Category: Data

What Students Want to Be

…when they grow up, that is. It’s a question we don’t ask that often. Yet since one of higher education’s supposed purposes is to give students a leg up in the search for work, it’s the kind of thing you’d think we’d want to know. So, anyways, using our CanEd Student Research Panel, we asked 1280 students across the country about their employment futures. For starters, we asked them what sector they saw themselves as destined for. Expected Employment by

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Hooked on School

What do Canadian students do when they’ve finished their university studies? And how do they differ from students in other parts of the world? We recently had the opportunity to examine country-level graduate surveys around the world. Now, there are important caveats – no two countries conduct the same survey among the same exact population of graduates at the exact same time (and international data agencies like the OECD restrict most of their graduate analysis to fairly basic indicators, such

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The Shape of Things to Come

Sit down before you look at this graph, which shows new investment in higher education in 2011. The data comes from our annual survey of 40 countries around the world which make up over 90% of all enrolments and scientific production. Change in Public Expenditures on Higher Education, 2011 The basic story here is this: in the OECD, we’ve finally hit what I call “Peak Higher Education”; the point beyond which we can no longer expect any increase in public

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Student Stereotypes in Four Graphs

We all know about stereotypes when it comes to students: computer science students resemble characters from The Big Bang Theory, arts students are inordinately fond of hackie-sack, etc. But is there any truth to this? Well, there is some, as it turns out. About a year ago we asked our CanEd Student Research Panel a series of questions about their attitudes toward academic challenges. The answers we got were interesting because of the way they broke down by field of study.

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New Summer Employment Data

It’s that time of year when the policy focus within PSE shifts – ever so briefly – to the issue of student summer employment. It’s a predictable news cycle: articles about the difficulties students are having finding jobs, government press releases about programs being rolled out this year, a couple of special Statscan releases, and it’ll be back to normal by mid-July. But despite the topic being a perennial one, we actually know very little about the student summer labour

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