Category: Data

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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More Data on Credit Transfer (Part 3)

So, yesterday we saw that, in fact, the vast majority of transfer students receive credit for their previous work, and in quite substantial amounts as well.  But what about the credits that didn’t get recognized? There’s a pretty clear correlation between non-recognition and changing programs.  Overall, university transfer students said that more than 60% of their credits were accepted for transfer (among those who had any credit accepted, it was roughly 75%).  But as the figure below shows, the results were

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Actual Data on Transfer Credit (Part 2)

It’s easy to make transfer credit seem like a really big deal.  Outside of BC and Alberta, institutional credit transfer policies are pretty ad hoc, and there’s no shortage of anecdotes about students having to re-do courses they’ve already done.  But little data has hitherto been available to help us understand the extent to which credit transfer policies affect times-to-completion. Until now. Using HESA’s CanEd Student Panel, we examined this question from a couple of different angles.  Figure 1 gives

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Enough with the Youth Declinism, Already

Can we please just stop with the “Generation Y are screwed” meme, already?  It’s utterly without foundation. Last week, the Canadian Press ran an article about a poll, which said that, due to inflated housing prices, 72% of Canadians aged 19-33 were pessimistic about ever owning a house.   This sounds terrible – until you look at the actual data. Census data shows that, in 2006, home ownership among 20-29 year olds was, in fact, at an all-time high.  True, the

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The Curious Case of Disappearing Student Debt

If you’re one of those people who obsessively follows stories about student debt, it’s possible you’ve heard some rumblings about the latest Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC) survey, which seems to show a drop in student debt over the last three years. CUSC is an important source of information about student debt in Canada.  Every three years, this consortium surveys a few tens of thousands of graduating students, and asks them (among other things) about their outstanding student debt.   We

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