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Category: Data

Revisiting the Looming Labour Shortage Theory

Various bits of labour market paranoia have been driving PSE policy lately.  The “skills shortage” is one – even if the case for its actual existence is pretty weak.  Another, though, is the broader idea that we’re about to hit a major labour shortage as boomer retirements… well, boom.  Time to explore that idea a bit. At the heart of the labour market shortage meme – popularized mainly by Rick Miner in papers such as, People Without Jobs, Jobs Without People, and Jobs of the Future – is the

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May 14, 2013 No Comments

The Universitas 21 National Rankings: a Spotlight on Canada

Though it made very little news in Canada when released in Vancouver last week, Universitas 21 Network (of which UBC and McGill are members) published the second edition of their Rankings of National Higher Education Systems.  There’s nothing really new in the 2013 ranking: the methodology is largely unchanged (there was a small redistribution of indicator weightings), as are the results – the top ten remains the same, and Canada stays 4th overall.  But it’s still an opportunity to reflect on

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May 13, 2013 No Comments

Feed the Students, Starve the Schools?

Yesterday, I outlined the 2013-14 budget picture for university and college operating transfer funds.  Today, I’m doing something similar for student assistance. It’s a very different picture. In addition to the caveats I mentioned yesterday regarding the challenges of budget-to-budget comparisons, student aid analysis poses its own unique set of challenges.  The main one is that provinces have trouble accurately predicting demand; so if in one year demand soars (or falls), the next year tends to bring a big budget

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May 10, 2013 2 Comments

The Changing Employment Picture: Old vs. Young?

I was playing around with CANSIM data on the weekend, when I saw something quite interesting regarding employment rates by age.  Check this out: Figure 1 Employment Rates by Age Group               Although it’s common-talk to say that we’re still in hard times, in fact, employment rates among the core working-age population are near an all-time high – 81.6% is the highest rate on record, apart from 2007 and 2008; it’s a full eight

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May 6, 2013 3 Comments

More Data on Skills Shortages

I’ve been doing some work on skills shortages recently, and came across this adorable little document from HRSDC.  It’s their employment projections for the period 2011-2021, and its conclusion is pretty unequivocal: we do not have major skills shortages in Canada, nor are we going to have them anytime soon. This prediction is based on something called COPS – the Canadian Occupation Projection System.  COPS makes long-term employment projections on an occupation-by-occupation basis, based on the major components of supply (new

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April 22, 2013 3 Comments

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