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Category: Data

Why We Can’t Have Nice Institutional Data

We’ve all heard of Open Universities, and we’ve all heard of Open Data.  But have you ever heard of Open University Data? Me neither.  And there’s a reason for that.  Two, actually.  Lack of volition, and lack of co-ordination. Lack of volition is the easy one.  Higher Education is a prestige economy.  The cardinal rule is: do not diminish your institution’s prestige.  The institution must be presented in the best possible light at all times.  Therefore, there is no incentive

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December 4, 2014 No Comments

Graduate Income Data Miracle on the Rideau

My friend and colleague Ross Finnie has just published a remarkable series of papers on long-term outcomes from higher education, which everyone needs to go read, stat. What he’s done is taken 13 years of student data from the University of Ottawa and linked it to income tax data held by Statistics Canada.  That means he can track income patterns by field of study, not over the puny 6-24 month period commonly used by provincial surveys, or the new 36-month

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November 25, 2014 3 Comments

Scenario Planning Outside Ontario and Quebec

After a one day hiatus, we’re back to the topic of scenario planning.  You’ll recall that on Wednesday, I showed some pretty pessimistic projections for what could happen to university financing in Quebec and Ontario.  Today, I have some better news for people in seven of the eight other provinces: your futures aren’t nearly so disastrous. When scenario-planning at the provincial level, four things matter: 1)      The forecast for nominal GDP.  Over the long-run, government budgets tend to remain pretty stable

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October 24, 2014 No Comments

The Problem with Global Reputation Rankings

I was in Athens this past June, at an EU-sponsored conference on rankings, which included a very intriguing discussion about the use of reputation indicators that I thought I would share with you. Not all rankings have reputational indicators; the Shanghai (ARWU) rankings, for instance, eschew them completely.  But QS and Times Higher Education (THE) rankings both weight them pretty highly (50% for QS, 35% for THE).  But this data isn’t entirely transparent.  THE, who release their World University Rankings

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September 30, 2014 3 Comments

Differentiation and Branding From the Student Perspective

One question that always comes up (or should come up, anyway) in discussions of university branding and positioning is: “how different is our institution, really”?  Well, for a few years, when we ran the Globe and Mail Canadian University Report survey, we used to ask students questions that would allow us to see how different students thought their university was.  The results were… interesting. We asked students to locate their institution on an 11-point double-ended scale.  Did they think their institution was

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September 29, 2014 5 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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