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Category: Data

Teaching Loads, Fairness, and Productivity

It’s been a long time since I’ve been as disappointed by an article on higher education as I was by the Star’s coverage of the release of the new HEQCO paper on teaching and research productivity.  A really long time. If you haven’t read the HEQCO paper yet, do so.  It’s great.  Using departmental websites, the authors (Linda Joncker and Martin Hicks) got a list of people teaching in Economics, Chemistry, and Philosophy at ten Ontario universities.  From course calendars, Google

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March 13, 2014 16 Comments

Those Times Higher Education Reputation Rankings, 2014

The Times Higher Education (THE) Rankings came out yesterday.  Compared to previous years, there was very little fanfare for the release this time.  And that’s probably because the results weren’t especially interesting. The thing to understand about rankings like this is that they are both profoundly true and profoundly trivial.  A few universities are undoubtedly seen as global standards, and so will always be at the top of the pile.  Previous THE rankings have shown that there is a “Big

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March 7, 2014 2 Comments

The Long-Term Benefits of Higher Education

A very good Statscan report came out last week, and didn’t get nearly enough attention.  Authored by the excellent Marc Frenette, it’s called, An Investment of a Lifetime? The Long-term Labour Market Outcomes Associated with a Post-Secondary Education, and it deserves a wide readership. What Frenette did was link the 1991 census file to the Longitudinal Worker File (LWF), which integrates data from Records of Employment, annual T1 and T4 files, and some data on employers as well, for a 10% random

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March 5, 2014 3 Comments

New Student Debt Numbers

So, the more stat-minded among you may have noted the release, this past Tuesday, of Statistics Canada’s 2012 Survey of Financial Security (SFS).  Though the main talking points were largely about mortgage debt, it also contained some interesting statistics on student debt. Now, remember that these are figures on outstanding student debt.  Some of it will be in repayment (i.e. held by graduates now in the labour force), and some of it will not (i.e. held by current students).  The way to

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February 27, 2014 No Comments

Why is Student Debt Not Increasing?

Yesterday, we discussed why student debt burdens were falling.  One of the key ingredients in that recipe was that student debt had remained stable, or even fallen, over the last decade or so.  This is a puzzling piece for many because it seems counterintuitive.  So what’s going on? Well, costs are increasing, but only modestly so: since 2000, tuition has only been rising about 2% above inflation.  There’s been no real change in the percentage of students living away from

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January 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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