Category: Data

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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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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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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