Category: Universities

A More Nuanced Look at Graduate Incomes

It’s all-Council-of-Ontario-Universities this week on the blog, but that’s because they’re the ones putting out the great data.  Today, it’s the annual survey on graduate outcomes which looks at how bachelor’s degree graduates are faring in the labour market.  Standard caveat: Ontario =/= Canada, but it produces nearly half the country’s bachelor degrees so it’s bound to be close to the national average and the trends you see here are unlikely to be much different that those you see anywhere else. Figure 1 shows

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Mind-blowing Ontario Academic Staffing Data (Part 2)

Today I want to go back to that COU report on academic staff I described yesterday (mind-blowing because of how much previously unavailable data it provided) and pick up on the other set of issues it raised: namely, the status of part-time and non-tenure track staff (ie. sessionals). The data is not perfect, but it is by several orders of magnitude the best thing ever published on the subject.  So here goes. The report makes a distinction between tenure stream

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Mind-blowing Ontario Academic Staffing Data (Part 1)

Buckle up everyone.  COU just did what universities have been telling everyone for years was impossible: publishing actual useful admin data on faculty workloads and sessionals from every university in Ontario bar the University of Toronto (speculate away as to why this is: the footnotes imply it’s because it couldn’t put together the data together properly). It’s all right here.  Read it.  It’s the best data ever put together on Canadian faculty. Oddly enough, COU published this yesterday with no fanfare

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UBC Strategic Plan

I don’t usually comment on under-development Strategic Plans, but I’m going to make an exception for the University of British Columbia because they’re doing something that is either going to be incredibly transformational or seriously catastrophic. Just a little bit of background.  The process (a full time-line and process notes are here) has been about as inclusive as you’re likely to see at a major university.  Which is to say, there have been a lot of test-the-water meetings but not necessarily

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Field of Study (oh the humanities!)

This is part II of a blog on new enrolment data. I’ll be focussing on the universities data today because the change there is more dynamic.  (I know, I know, college peeps: I don’t pay enough attention to you.  I’ll try to make this up to you next week). So let’s look at the division of undergraduate enrolment for a second.  Figure 1 shows the split between fields of science.  The Big Six are Social Science & Law (20%), Business/Commerce/Administration

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