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Category: PSE Outcomes

How Bad is Student/Youth Unemployment These Days?

Interesting question. It’s a tricky answer. Let’s dive in. Let’s start by looking at the issue of unemployment – that is, the percentage of people who are in the labour market but do not have work (i.e. it excludes people who aren’t interested). Figure 1 shows unemployment rates for full-time students and non-students aged 20-24 for the past fifty years (I exclude part-time students because they are an odd and heterogenous grouping).  Figure 1: Unemployment Rates during School Months for

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January 21, 2026 2 Comments

That Was The Quarter That Was, Summer 2025

Welcome to TWTQTW for June-September. Things were a little slow in July, but with back to school happening in most of the Northern Hemisphere sometime between last August and late September, the stories began pouring in.  You might think that “back to school” would deliver up lots of stories about enrolment trends, but you’d mostly be wrong. While few countries are as bad as Canada when it comes to up-to date enrolment data, it’s a rare country that can give

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October 8, 2025 No Comments

Education at a Glance 2025, Part 2

Three weeks ago, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its annual stat fest, Education at a Glance (see last week’s blog for more on this year’s higher education and financing data). The most interesting thing about this edition is that the OECD chose to release some new data from the recent Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) relating to literacy and numeracy levels that were included in the PIAAC 2013 release (see also here), but not in the December

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September 29, 2025 1 Comment

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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September 17, 2024 1 Comment

Does Time-to-Completion Matter?

One thing you occasionally hear from governments is complaints about the inefficiency of post-secondary education programs. This is distinct from the questions around inefficiency of post-secondary institutions, which is usually code for “those damn profs are making too much money.” The argument about program inefficiency usually goes something like this: “It’s an [X]-year program! Why are students taking [X+1] or [X + 2] years to complete. That’s inefficient! A waste of money! We need to get students through these programs

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September 10, 2024 5 Comments

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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