Category: Data

What Would a Global Common Data Set Look Like?

The discussion Kris Olds and I started a couple of days ago (see here and here) about a global common data set seems to have generated quite a bit of discussion, so I thought I would flesh out two sets of thoughts regarding what a Global CDS would need to look like – today: content; tomorrow: governance. Start with first principles on content: it needs to be common enough that most institutions around the world are able to produce it. That

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Counting Faculty, Counting Students

Though amateur higher education statisticians are addicted to it, there is virtually no statistic less useful than the student-staff ratio. There are basically two reasons why this is the case. The first is that not all students are alike. Some are full-time, some are part-time. This problem is reasonably easy to solve by creating a method for calculating full-time equivalency. But for this, the number of credit-hours students take must be transparent. The second is that not all professors are

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What Students Think They Lack

A treat today! More data from our CanEd Student Research Panel on employment. You know the drill: 1280 students from our regular monthly panel. We asked these students what skills or attributes they thought they “lacked but most wished they had” in terms of landing a job after graduation. Here’s the interesting thing: very few students thought they were deficient in any technical skills. For the most part, it’s the soft skills students thought they lacked. Among the most common

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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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