The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

The World of Higher Education Podcast Listen now →

Category: PSE Outcomes

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

Read More »
September 10, 2024 5 Comments

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

Read More »
April 15, 2024 2 Comments

Education at a Glance 2023

The OECD’s annual Education at a Glance (EAG) report came out last week.  It’s a One Thought tradition to go through this report in detail for the latest international comparisons on institutional income and participation rates, but I’m going to mostly forego that this year.  That’s partially because I have a doozy of a piece coming out on finance in a week or two, but also because this year’s EAG contains some interesting special topics worth looking at, particularly with

Read More »
September 20, 2023 1 Comment

Three Unrelated Stories

Sometimes I need a mental break from writing a few hundred words on one topic.  So, today, here’s a few hundred words on three separate topics. 1) The Sexuality Gap.  A few years ago, Statistics Canada threw a question on sexual orientation into the Canadian Community Health Survey.   What this meant was that we suddenly got a lot of demographic data on the country’s LGBTQ+ population, including the finding – published in Ethnocultural diversity among lesbian, gay and bisexual cultures

Read More »
May 8, 2023 No Comments

New Data on Completion Rates

For the last few years, Statscan has been publishing cohort completion data using the Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS).  A new round of data dropped last week, and there were several interesting nuggets for anyone who cared to dive in a little bit behind the headline numbers.  Let’s dive in, shall we? Let’s begin with university undergraduate degrees.  Figure 1 shows the 6-year completion rate for undergraduate degrees in Canada (note, completion here refers to completion of the degree-level in

Read More »
January 19, 2023 No 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.

Subscribe

Search Posts

Search Publications

Social Media

Linkedin Youtube Spotify

Recent Posts

More thoughts on...