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Category: Data

A Good Decade for Profs

I was browsing through some Statistics Canada data on university salaries the other day, and I rapidly came to the conclusion that there have been few decades in which it was better to be a prof than the last one. As the following table shows, over the years 2001 to 2009 (the years for which I could get good-quality data from Statscan for free – this email’s not paying a paying gig unfortunately), pay for full professors in non-medical disciplines

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January 10, 2012 3 Comments

Fun with Class Size Data

Yesterday, I promised to show you some of the data on our alternative measure of class size (see here for more details). Some preliminaries, though: Our measure of “average number of classmates” may be a bit crude (it depends on student estimates of class sizes), but it is robust. Institutional averages bounce around by a few percent each year, but long-term averages – which at most institutions involve between two and four thousand observations – are pretty stable. To avoid

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January 6, 2012 1 Comment

Alternate Measures of Class Size

It may sound silly, but calculating and comparing average class sizes across institutions is very hard to do. Here’s why. Back when institutions actually paid attention to Maclean’s, the class size questions were the easiest to “massage,” because there was no common definition of what constituted a class. Do course sections count? What about instrument practice classes in music faculties? Many universities gamed the system by including these for the purposes of calculating “average class size” but excluding them when

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January 5, 2012 2 Comments

Faculty Productivity

It’s easy to get distracted by arguments about whether faculty are paid too much or too little. The better question is: why does everyone get paid on more or less the same scale when the massive differences in productivity between staff are so obvious? Some interesting evidence about this came recently from Texas. Last year, Governor Rick Perry (yes, him… the one who makes Herman Cain look Presidential) asked the state’s public universities to make data available on each professor

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December 7, 2011 5 Comments

Graduate Incomes and Getting Better Data

With most of the world undergoing a serious bout of youth unemployment, there’s been a lot of focus on graduate earnings and whether or not we are “overproducing” graduates. As I’ve noted before, some of this talk is nonsense, but given the times, the focus on outcomes isn’t surprising. Don’t tell Margaret Wente, but in China the government is actively cutting majors that don’t produce high levels of post-graduation employment. In the U.S., there’s an increasing number of stories (like

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November 30, 2011 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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