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Category: Data

Administrative Bloat?

If there’s one common complaint among academic staff it’s that non-academic staff… administrators… are multiplying like weeds, and taking over the university.  Of course, no one can tell if this is actually happening because Canadian universities have never bothered to put together any common statistics on non-academic staff. What we do have, though, is data on non-academic staff compensation – that is, we can see how much non-academic staff were paid in any given year, and track that over time.  We can then

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January 8, 2014 11 Comments

Unorthodox Dropout Statistics

Every once in awhile, some policy-maker or journalist gets their knickers in a twist about dropout rates.  And whenever that happens, people start looking for data.  Which, in this case, basically doesn’t exist. Institutions have their own non-completion data, but since lots of people switch institutions for one reason or another a non-complete doesn’t equal a “dropout”.  Our national unit-record system – Statistics Canada’s Post-Secondary Student Information System – is supposed to be able to solve this precise problem, but

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November 29, 2013 11 Comments

Using PIAAC to Measure Value-Added in Higher Ed: US Good, Australia Abysmal

A few weeks ago, when commenting on the PIAAC release, I noted that one could use the results to come up with a very rough-and-ready measure of “value added” in higher education.  PIAAC contains two relevant pieces of data for this: national mean literacy scores for students aged 16-19 completing upper-secondary education, and national mean literacy scores for students aged 16-29 who have completed Tertiary A.  Simply by subtracting the former from the latter, one arrives at a measure of

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November 13, 2013 6 Comments

How Domestic Students Experience Internationalization on Campus

So today, my colleague Jaqueline Lambert and I released a paper on how Canadian students view the process of internationalization (you can download the paper here).  It’s a mixed bag, frankly. On the one hand, we find pretty clearly that students buy into the principles of internationalization.  They are very positive about the goals internationalization is meant to foster (diversity, more global awareness), and they’re even enthused about how an increased presence of foreign students improves their schools’ prestige.  Over forty percent

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October 24, 2013 2 Comments

Faculty Salary Data You Should Probably Ignore

Recently, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) published a comparison of American and Canadian academics’ salaries.  Using Canada’s National Household Survey (NHS) and the US Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) survey (which they described as being not quite apples-to-apples, but at least Macintosh-to-Granny Smith), they noted that average salaries for the combined college-and-university instructor population (the OES cannot disaggregate below that level) were $76,000.  In Canada, the figure was $65,000.  Hence, according to them, with the dollar at par, there is

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October 22, 2013 7 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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