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Category: Institutions

Systematically Valuing the Wrong Things

Michael Staton is a former teacher, venture capitalist, and founder of Uversity, which is a kind of data nerd Strategic Enrolment Management outfit in the US.  He also has some interesting ideas about the “unbundling” of higher education, which have appeared – amongst other places – in Andrew Kelly and Kevin Carey’s recent book Stretching the Higher Education Dollar (ungated copy available here). His take is that there are four basic groups of services that undergraduate education strives to deliver, and that in at

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September 18, 2014 1 Comment

Welcome to the Crisis

I just took a look at the new enrolment confirmation statistics for Ontario universities.  They are jaw-dropping. Overall, the system experienced its first fall in “number of confirmed enrolments from secondary school” since (I believe) the early 1990s (I say “I believe” because OUAC doesn’t have public stats that go that far back, but I think that’s right).  Ever since the double-cohort, the province’s universities have seen a steady annual 3% bump in total direct-entry enrolments.  That’s been the source

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September 17, 2014 2 Comments

Hosanna! *More* Graduate Income Data!

Okay, so I goofed on Tuesday.  Contrary to what I said, Colleges Ontario actually does publish sector-wide data on graduate incomes six months out – they just don’t publish it with the rest of the KPI data.  Instead, it’s at the back of the graduate outcomes section of their excellent annual Environment Scan (thanks to Glenn for the heads up).  So let’s take a look at what they say. On Tuesday we noted that graduate employment outcomes for college graduates six-months out seemed to

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September 12, 2014 No Comments

More Graduate Labour Market Data

Yesterday I showed that recent Ontario university graduates’ incomes are taking a beating, notably in Arts and Sciences.  I’m sure this led to a fair bit of crowing among those who claim we have too many students in university, and they all oughta go to college instead because skills, new economy, yadda yadda. The problem with that argument is that college grads are getting creamed in the labour market, too. Now, we can’t compare university and college outcomes in terms of

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September 9, 2014 1 Comment

Higher Education as a Positional Good

In policy circles, we talk a lot about whether education is a public or a private good (it’s both), and what the implications are for pricing.  But one thing we don’t talk enough about is the extent to which education is a positional good.  And that’s a problem because our decisions on this topic have serious implications for the way we fund higher education. What’s a positional good?  It’s a good that derives part of its value from the fact it’s valuable,

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September 2, 2014 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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