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Category: Data

Reports, Books, and CUDO

It’s getting close to that time of year when I need to sign off for the holidays (tomorrow will be the last blog until January 4th).  So before then, I thought it would be worth quickly catching up on a few things. Some reports you may have missed.  A number of reports have come out recently that I have been meaning to review.  Two, I think, are of passing note: i) The Alberta Auditor-general devoted part of his annual report (see pages

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December 10, 2015 2 Comments

Defending Liberal Arts: Try Using Data

A few weeks back, I wrote about the Liberals Arts/humanities, and some really bad arguments both for and against them.  As usual when I write these, I got a lot of feedback to the effect of: “well, how would you defend the Liberal Arts, smart guy”?  Which, you know, fair enough.  So, here’s my answer. The humanities, at root, are about pattern recognition in the same way that the sciences and the social sciences are: they just seek patterns in different areas of

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December 4, 2015 3 Comments

The 2015 OECD Education at a Glance

So the OECD’s Education at a Glance was published yesterday.  It’s taken a couple of months longer than usual because of the need to convert  into the new International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) system.  No, don’t ask; it’s better not to know. I won’t say there’s a whole lot new in this issue that will be of interest to PSE-types.  One point of note is that Statscan has – for no obvious or stated reason – substantially restated Canadian expenditure

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November 25, 2015 No Comments

Class Size, Teaching Loads, and that Curious CUDO Data Redux

You may recall that last week I posted some curious data from CUDO, which suggested that the ratio of undergraduate “classes” (we’re not entirely sure what this means) to full-time professors in Ontario was an amazingly-low 2.4 to 1.  Three quick follow-ups to that piece. 1.  In the previous post, I offered space on the blog to anyone involved with CUDO who could clear up the mystery of why undergraduate teaching loads appeared to be so low.  No one has taken

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November 24, 2015 5 Comments

Curious Data on Teaching Loads in Ontario

Back in 2006, university Presidents got so mad at Maclean’s that they stopped providing data to the publication.  Recognizing that this might create the impression that they had something to hide, they developed something called “Common University Dataset Ontario” (CUDO) to provide the public with a number of important quantitative descriptors of each university.  In theory, this data is of better quality and more reliable than the stuff they used to give Maclean’s. One of the data elements in CUDO has

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November 17, 2015 2 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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