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Category: Data

An Interesting but Irritating Report on Graduate Overqualification

On Thursday, the Office of Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) released a report on the state of the Canadian labour market.  It’s one of those things the PBO does because the state of the labour market drives the federal budget, to some extent.  But in this report, the PBO decided to do something different: it decided to look at the state of the labour market from the point of view of recent graduates, and specifically whether graduates are “overqualified” for their

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November 16, 2015 2 Comments

How Canadian Universities Got Both Big and Rich

Earlier this week, I gave a speech in Shanghai on whether countries are choosing to focus higher education spending on top institutions as a response to the scarcity of funds since the start of the global financial crisis.  I thought some of you might be interested in this, so over the next two days I’ll be sharing some of the data from that presentation.  The story I want to tell today is about how exceptional the Canadian story has been among the

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November 4, 2015 No Comments

Canadian University Finances: An Update

Back in July, the Canadian Association of University Business Officers released the results of its survey of university finances for 2013-14.  The results underline the fact that institutions in Canada are facing some highly heterogeneous financial circumstances. Let’s start with operating budgets.  Though universities are allegedly facing some kind of unprecedented austerity, total operating income rose by 4.17% in real dollars from the previous year  (inflation from September 2012 to September 2013 was a shade over 1%).  Income from government rose 0.9% in real dollars, from $11.1 billion to $11.2 billion.  But

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October 19, 2015 1 Comment

Statistics Canada is in the Wrong Century

If what you are looking for is agricultural statistics, Statistics Canada is a wondrous place.  See, Statscan even made a fabulous (if oddly truncated) little video about agricultural statistics. Statscan can tell you *anything* about agriculture.  Monthly oilseed crushing statistics?  No problem (59,387 tonnes in August, in case you were wondering).  It can tell you on a weekly basis the weight of all eggs laid and processed in Canada (week of August 1st = 2.3 million kilograms); it can even break it down by

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October 13, 2015 2 Comments

Higher Education Data Glasnost

Many people complain that there is a lack of post-secondary data in Canada.  But this is actually not true.  There are tons of data about; it’s just that institutions won’t share or publish much of it. Let me tell you a little story.  Once upon a time, there was a small, public-minded higher education research company that wanted to create the equivalent of Statistics Canada’s university tuition fee index for colleges.  The company had completed a project like this before, but

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October 8, 2015 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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