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Category: Data

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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March 28, 2013 3 Comments

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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March 26, 2013 1 Comment

Skills Shortages (Part 2)

As I noted yesterday, much of the talk about skills shortages in Canada is data-free, and factually-challenged.  What, for instance, are we to make of claims that we have a huge shortage of people in the construction trades, when even a simple look at Labour Force Survey data tells a very different story? Unemployment by Industry, 2007-2012               Yeah, that’s right: workers in the social sciences, education, and government fields (mostly university graduates) have

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March 20, 2013 2 Comments

Comparing Outcomes Across Credentials

I was doing some random websurfing the other day and I came across the BC Student Outcomes Page, which makes freely available an absolute cornucopia of data on its graduates.  BC has a seriously decent survey set-up, in that they do surveys of each graduating class, every year – universities, colleges, apprenticeships, you name it.  Actually, it’s probably overkill, but for data nerds like me it’s absolute heaven. Anyways, BC surveys all its graduates between 9 and 20 months after

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March 18, 2013 3 Comments

MOOCs, Data, and the Public Interest

One of the reasons MOOCs are interesting as a pedagogical experiment is that, being online, they generate lots of capturable data.  This should create a data-rich environment which improves our understanding of learning processes, etc etc. So why is so little data about MOOCs actually being made public? Katy Jordan of the UK Open University just put together a nice little graphic about MOOC enrolment and success rates.  While her conclusions are interesting (avg enrolment = 50,000; avg. completion rate = 10%),

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March 1, 2013 3 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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