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Category: Data

Student Health (Part 3)

You know how it is when someone tries to make a point about Canadian higher education using data from American universities? It’s annoying.  Makes you want to (verbally) smack them upside the head. Canada and the US are different, you want to yell. Don’t assume the data are the same! But of course the problem is there usually isn’t any Canadian data, which is part of why these generalizations get started in the first place. Well, one of the neat

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June 5, 2017 2 Comments

Student Health (part 1)

I have been perusing a quite astonishingly detailed survey that was recently released regarding student health.  Run by the American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment, this multi-campus exercise has been run twice now in Canada – once in 2013 and once in 2016.  Today, I’m going to look at what the 2016 results say, which are interesting in and of themselves.  Tomorrow, I’m going to look at how the data has changed since 2013 and why I think some claims

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June 1, 2017 2 Comments

Student/Graduate Survey Data

This is my last thought on data for awhile, I promise.  But I want to talk a little bit today about what we’re doing wrong with the increasing misuse of student and graduate surveys. Back about 15 years ago, the relevant technology for email surveys became sufficiently cheap and ubiquitous that everyone started using them.  I mean, everyone.  So what has happened over the last decade and a half has been a proliferation of surveys and with it – surprise,

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April 5, 2017 No Comments

How to Think about “Better Higher Education Data”

Like many people, I am in favour of better data on the higher education sector.  But while this call unites a lot of people, there is remarkably little thinking that goes into the question of how to achieve it.  This is a problem, because unless we arrive at a better common understanding of both the cost and the utility of different kinds of data, we are going to remain stuck in our current position. First, we need to ask ourselves

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April 4, 2017 1 Comment

Data on Race/Ethnicity

A couple of week ago, CBC decided to make a big deal about how terrible Canadian universities were for not collecting data on race (see Why so many Canadian universities Know so little about their own racial diversity). As you all know, I’m a big proponent of better data in higher education. But the effort involved in getting new data has to be in some way proportional to the benefit derived from that data. And I’m pretty sure this doesn’t

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April 3, 2017 11 Comments
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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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