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Category: Data

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

Can You Build Your Way to Happiness?

With a half dozen universities currently planning upgrades to their athletics facilities, it’s worth asking the question: what’s the impact of these things on student satisfaction? (Yes…we know…satisfaction isn’t everything. But it’s not nothing, either. And it has the singular value of being measurable, so…onwards!) We have two recent case studies here. In 2009, Queen’s completed a new $230 million athletics complex, while in 2010, Trent completed an $18 million renovation to its own athletics building. What kind of effects

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November 18, 2011 No Comments

Helicopter Parents: Grounded?

We’ve all seen stories about “helicopter parents,” parents who hover over their children even after they enrol in university. But most of these stories are American in origin and tend to be anecdotal in nature. What’s the reality in Canada? A few months ago, we asked our regular CanEd Student Research Panel what kind of on-going involvement their parents had in their lives. Did their parents help them with their homework or help them select courses or extracurricular activities? Had

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November 16, 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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