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Category: Data

Some Insights Into Medium-term Education Outcomes

As I noted yesterday, Canada is unnecessarily bad at looking at medium-term outcomes of education. The only place where we have data on university graduates even five years out is in BC, and they publish the data in such a weird format (seriously: check it out) that no one really explores them. It could be worse. In 2005, Statscan, did a 5-year follow-up of the class of 2000 and elected not to publish any results relating to employment or income.

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June 4, 2013 No Comments

A Better Way to Track Graduates

The real problem Canada has with respect to the whole “does-education-pay” debate is data. It’s not that we don’t have people collecting data – we do, lots of them. The problem is that they’re all collecting data over time frames so short as to be largely meaningless. The gold standard used to be the National Graduate Survey, which surveyed every fifth graduating class two and five years out. Now the 2-year survey is a year behind schedule and the 5-year

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June 3, 2013 1 Comment

Post-Graduation Employment

The meme on “underperforming universities” these days revolves around the idea that specific fields of study – usually Bachelor’s degrees in the humanities – do not lead to good jobs.  But this depends in no small measure on what one means by a “good job”, and over what time frame one chooses to measure success. The graph below shows data from Ontario, six months after graduation.  Between 2003-2007, the employment rate of graduates in the labour market (i.e. excluding those

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May 21, 2013 5 Comments

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
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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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