Category: Data

The Eighth Wonder of the World: Ontario College Finances to 2023-24

Over the summer some of the HESA team went through the financial statements of the 24 Ontario Community Colleges for both 2022-2023 and 2023-24 statements. It’s…well, pretty wild. Ontario colleges were going after international students pretty heavily before COVID. But in the two years since the pandemic mostly subsided, the numbers are crazy. We don’t know exactly how crazy because the Government of Ontario, in an amazing show of either incompetence or gutlessness, is now five months late in releasing

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A Sub-par Study on Returns to Education

Last Week, Royal Bank produced a study with the brash headline “Financial Returns After a Post-Secondary Education Have Diminished.” Within the limited terms of the limited methodology of the first half of the mini-paper, the headline is not entirely incorrect. But man, this is a disappointing piece of analysis from an organization with pretensions to thought leadership. So, what does this paper say? Basically, part 1 of the paper takes four data points for university (NOT all of post-secondary—strike one

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A Research Agenda for Canadian Higher Education, Part 2

Just a note that I am at the CAUBO Conference in Montreal today…if you are attending, do drop by my session today after lunch and say “hi.” Yesterday I sketched out a possible research agenda for Canadian higher education. Today, I am going to sketch out how we can best achieve this. What needs to be done at the National level The most important thing we could do is replace the Youth In Transition Survey. This was a longitudinal survey which followed

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A Research Agenda for Canadian Higher Education, Part 1

There is so much about Canadian higher education that we don’t know. Today, a list of the most important unknowns that I think are most important, organized by broad topic. Who Gets Into Post-Secondary Education: Also, Where and Why and For How Long? Our data on who gets into post-secondary education has got a little bit better in the last little while. For instance, check out this interesting piece by Tomasz Handler, Aneta Bonikowska and Marc Frenette which looks at Bachelor’s degree

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A Smart Paper on Access and Persistence

Last week Statistics Canada came out with a damn good paper on post-secondary access and persistence which I thought was worth highlighting. The paper is called Enrollment and Persistence in Postsecondary Education Among High School Graduates in British Columbia: A Focus on Special Needs Students, and it was written by Allison Leanage and Rubab Arim. It was made possible by linking together two databases: the Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS), which contains unit-record data on all post-secondary students in Canada

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