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Category: Data

Visible Minority Numbers Rise Sharply

I was poking around some data from the Canadian Undergraduate Survey Consortium the other day and I found some utterly mind-blowing data.  Take a look at these statistics on the percentage of first-year students self-identifying as a “visible minority” on the Consortium’s triennial Survey of First Year Students: Figure 1: Self-Identified Visible Minority Students as a Percentage of Entering Class, 2001-2013               Crazy, right?  Must be all those international students flooding in. Er, no.  Well,

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September 15, 2015 4 Comments

Better Post-Secondary Data: Game On

On Saturday morning, the US Department of Education released the College Scorecard.  What the heck is the College Scorecard, you ask?  And why did they release it on a Saturday morning?  Well, I have no earthly idea about the latter, but as for the former: it’s a bit of a long story. You might remember that a little over a year ago, President Obama came up with the idea for the US Government to “rate” colleges on things like affordability, graduation rates, graduate earnings

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September 14, 2015 No Comments

One Lens for Viewing “Administrative Bloat”

The Globe’s Gary Mason wrote an interesting article yesterday about the Gupta resignation.  Actually, let me qualify: he wrote a very odd article, which ignored basically everything his Globe colleagues Simona Chiose and Frances Bula had reported the previous week, in order to peddle a tale in which the UBC Board fired Gupta for wanting to reduce administrative costs. This, frankly, sounds insane.  But Mason’s article did include some very eye-opening statistics on the increase of administrative staff at UBC over the past

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September 3, 2015 9 Comments

Some Basically Awful Graduate Outcomes Data

Yesterday, the Council of Ontario Universities released the results of the Ontario Graduates’ Survey for the class of 2012.  This document is a major source of information regarding employment and income for the province’s university graduates.  And despite the chipperness of the news release (“the best path to a job is still a university degree”), it actually tells a pretty awful story when you do things like, you know, place it in historical context, and adjust the results to account

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September 2, 2015 12 Comments

Student Debt in Canada: Sorry, Still no Crisis

If you’re in the looking-at-student-debt business in Canada, your data sources are limited.  Provinces could publish their debt figures annually, but they don’t.  Canada Student Loans does publish its debt numbers annually, but it includes nothing on provincial debt, so it’s not very useful.  Statistics Canada surveys graduating students every five years, but only three years out from graduation, so the most recent data we have from that source is now five years old.  Kinda sucks. But there is one

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July 16, 2015 No Comments
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