Category: Data

Research Outcome and Impact Data

Every couple of years I do a piece looking at how Canadian institutions compare in terms of research output and impact using data from the CWTS Leiden Rankings, which happen to be the most transparent system of bibliometric research rankings out there. It’s that time again. So, just to remind people what the CWTS Leiden ranking actually is: the good folks who do scientometrics at the University of Leiden annually put together a wide variety of bibliometrics measures for about

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New Graduate Salary Data (NGS 2020)

Last week, I went through some of the data from the new National Graduates Survey (NGS) on student debt. Today, I’d like to go through the new data from this survey on graduate salaries. It’s…not great. The first way it is not great, of course, is that truly comparable data only goes back ten years. This is because although the NGS goes back to the graduating class in 1982 (with an antecedent in 1976), Statistics Canada decided in 2010 to

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Two Ways of Looking at Academic Hiring

One of the endlessly recurring debates in Canadian higher education concerns whether institutions are properly investing in faculty.  It’s never entirely clear what “properly” means – the goalposts move a bit depending on who is talking.  Sometimes it’s about faculty hiring lagging behind student enrolment, sometimes it’s faculty not getting their “share” of money coming into universities.  The comparator varies, but the ratio is always claimed to be moving in the wrong direction.  This blog seeks to examine this claim

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Visible Minority Students in Canadian Post-Secondary Education

Kudos today to Statistics Canada, which is gradually producing useful information using its new Education and Labour Market Longitudinal Platform (ELMLP).  Last Thursday it put out – weirdly, in conditions of almost total secrecy – a new set of tables looking at visible minorities and ethnicity in Canadian post-secondary education. This dataset required linking individual record data from the Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS), which does not record any data about ethnicity, with individual record data from the census, which

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Long-Term OECD Data on Institutional Financing

Just for fun, I went prowling through some back issues of OECD’s Education at a Glance (as one does), to look up how public financing of tertiary education has changed over time.  OECD specifically says you shouldn’t do this, which I see as an admission that they view the data submitted by national governments as either not particularly reliable or at least compiled by different people using different definitions/standards on an annual basis.   Having looked over the data, I can

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