Category: Data

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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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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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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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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Hosanna! *More* Graduate Income Data!

Okay, so I goofed on Tuesday.  Contrary to what I said, Colleges Ontario actually does publish sector-wide data on graduate incomes six months out – they just don’t publish it with the rest of the KPI data.  Instead, it’s at the back of the graduate outcomes section of their excellent annual Environment Scan (thanks to Glenn for the heads up).  So let’s take a look at what they say. On Tuesday we noted that graduate employment outcomes for college graduates six-months out seemed to

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