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Category: Data

Counting Sessionals

Much rejoicing last Thursday when Science Minister Kirsty Duncan announced that the federal government was re-instating the funding for the Universities and Colleges Academic Staff System (UCASS), which was last run in 2011.     But what caught most people’s attention was the coda to the announcement, which said that Statistics Canada was going to “test the feasibility” of expanding the survey to include “part-time and public college staff” (the “C” in UCASS stands for colleges in the Trinity College sense, not the

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September 19, 2016 No Comments

OECD data says still no underfunding

The OECD’s annual datapalooza-tastic publication Education at a Glance was released yesterday.  The pdf is available for free here.  Let me take you through a couple of the highlights around Higher Education. For the following comparisons, I show Canada against the rest of the G7 (minus Italy because honestly, economically, who cares?), plus Australia because it’s practically our twin, Korea because it’s cool, Sweden because someone always asks about Scandinavia and the OECD average because hey that just makes sense. 

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September 16, 2016 No Comments

Some Intriguing New UK Access Data

The UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency (also known in these parts as “the other HESA”) put out an interesting report recently on participation in higher education in England (available here).  England is of course of great interest to access researchers everywhere because its massive tuition hike in 2012 is a major natural policy experiment: if there is no clear evidence of changes in access after a tuition hike of that magnitude then we can be more confident that tuition hikes

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September 9, 2016 No Comments

Know Your Incoming Students (Part 1)

As the school year starts, it’s always valuable to take a look at trends in incoming students.  The best tool we have for that in Canada for doing this is the Canadian Undergraduate Survey Consortium’s triennial survey of first-year students (the most recent version is here.  It’s not the greatest of instruments: consortium membership changes from cycle to cycle, so the base population is neither equal to the national first-year population nor stable from cycle to cycle.  But since Statistics

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August 30, 2016 1 Comment

Measuring Teaching Quality

The Government of Ontario, in its ongoing quest to try to reform its funding formula, continues to insist that one element of the funding formula needs to relate to the issue of “teaching quality” or “quality of the undergraduate experience”.  Figuring out how to do this is of course a genuine puzzle. There are some of course who believe that quality can only be measured in terms of inputs (i.e. funding) and not through outputs (hi, OCUFA!)  Some like the

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August 17, 2016 4 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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