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Category: Data

A Closer Look at Student Debt (Part 1)

A few months ago, we reported that increases in student debt in the 2000s did not keep up with tuition, owing largely to increases in student grant and bursary programs. Yet the raw amount of student debt at graduation tells only part of the story. Thinking about debt in terms of balance owing can obscure more than it reveals; it’s also worth looking at debt from the lens of monthly student loan payments. Given student loans’ fixed repayment period, monthly

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April 13, 2012 5 Comments

Bibliometrics, Part Deux: Database Politics

Back in the 1950s, someone came up with the idea of creating indexes of citations in scientific journals. The Science Citation Index then appeared in 1961, and one for the social sciences followed in 1966. Ever since that time, it has been possible to answer questions like: “who publishes more articles” and “whose articles are being cited more”? With little effort, you can aggregate up from individual academics to departments or institutions, and this data feeds many international rankings systems.

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March 26, 2012 No Comments

The Heinous Difficulty in Understanding What Works

The empirical consensus on the question of barriers to access in Canadian education is pretty clear: and among those few secondary school graduates who don’t go on to post-secondary education, affordability is very much a secondary issue (not non-existent, but secondary). The primary issue is that most of these young people don’t feel very motivated by the idea of spending more years in a classroom. It’s a vicious circle: these students don’t identify with education, so they don’t work at

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February 29, 2012 2 Comments

Statistics Canada and the Two Types of Data

People often berate Statistics Canada when it comes to producing data on education in Canada. And not entirely without reason: there are some statistics that Canadians seem to be especially bad at producing. But it’s also worth noting that there are other kinds of data that Statscan is extraordinarily good at capturing – data that researchers in other countries would kill to have. When it comes to research, there are broadly two types of data. The first is factual, aggregate

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February 23, 2012 No Comments

Senior Management Salaries and Titles

A couple of weeks ago we had a fun look at academic salaries. And I know some of you were thinking: “Why pick on profs? What about skyrocketing administrative salaries?” Fair enough – let’s look at what happened to administrative pay in the last decade. To stay consistent with earlier data on professors’ salaries, I use 2001 and 2009 as reference years. This being a free email, I stick to easily-accessible, cost-free data – namely, salary disclosure information from the

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January 30, 2012 1 Comment
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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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