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Category: Data

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

Why Student Debt Burden is Falling Like a Stone

Everyone talks about “rising student debt burdens” as if they are real.  But they’re not.  In fact, the burden of carrying a student loan has fallen significantly over the past decade. Student loan burden is best measured by looking at the percentage of monthly after-tax income that it takes to service a loan each month.  This figure will therefore be affected by four different factors, namely: the size of student loan debt, interest rates, post-graduation income, and taxes.  Here’s what’s happened

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January 28, 2014 1 Comment

Student/Faculty Ratios Across Fields of Study

Here’s an intriguing question: what do student/faculty ratios look like across the academy?  No one ever publishes this number.  What you tend to get out of the Statscan data (with a little help from the excellent folks who put out the CAUT Almanac) is a graph of overall student/faculty ratios, such as the one below in Figure 1, which shows that across all institutions and all fields, there has been an increase of about 20% in the faculty/student ratio over the

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January 14, 2014 2 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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