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Category: Data

Losing Count

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: Canada is not sufficiently innovative, and part of the reason is that we don’t spend enough on research.  It’s not that we don’t spend enough on *public* research; adjusted for GDP, we actually do above-average on that.  What pulls us down is in international comparisons corporate R & D.  Our narrow-minded, short-sighted, resource-obsessed business class spends far less on R&D than its equivalents in most other country, and that is what gives

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March 27, 2017 3 Comments

Garbage Data on Sexual Assaults

I am going to do something today which I expect will not put me in good stead with one of my biggest clients.  But the Government of Ontario is considering something unwise and I feel it best to speak up. As many of you know, the current Liberal government is very concerned about sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus, and has devoted no small amount of time and political capital to getting institutions to adopt new rules and regulations around said

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February 23, 2017 3 Comments

A Slice of Canadian Higher Education History

There are a few gems scattered through Statistics Canada’s archives. Digging around their site the other day, I came across a fantastic trove of documents published by the Dominion Bureau of Statistics (as StatsCan used to be called) called Higher Education in Canada. The earliest number in this series dates from 1938, and is available here. I urge you to read the whole thing, because it’s a hoot. But let me just focus in on a couple of points in

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January 27, 2017 4 Comments

More Bleak Data, But This Time on Colleges

Everyone seems to be enjoying data on graduate outcomes, so I thought I’d keep the party going by looking at similar data from Ontario colleges. But first, some of you have written to me suggesting I should throw some caveats on what’s been covered so far. So let me get a few things out of the way. First, I goofed when saying that there was no data on response rates from these surveys. Apparently there is and I just missed

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January 18, 2017 No Comments

Restore the NGS!

One of the best things that Statistics Canada ever did in the higher education field was the National Graduates’ Survey (NGS). OK, it wasn’t entirely Statscan – NGS has never been a core product funded from the Statscan budget but rather funded periodically by Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) or HRDC or HRSDC or whatever earlier version of the department you care to name – but they were the ones doing the execution. After a trial run in the

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January 13, 2017 No 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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