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Category: PSE Outcomes

How Europe Measures Equity in Admissions

When doing international comparative work in higher education, you’ll realise that the difficulty in comparing systems goes far beyond differences in system architecture and inconsistencies in data.  It’s more that there are genuine differences in how some issues are framed.  Take for instance, the issue of equity in admissions.  In North America, great positivists that we are, we would measure equity in admissions.  Report on them.  Try to improve on them.  We can see this in the United States all

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April 6, 2022 No Comments

Anticipating Market Demand

A few days ago, someone asked me how institutions, in practice, are supposed to go about trying to anticipate market demand when coming up with new courses.  Since this is something we at HESA Towers does for a number of clients, I thought the answer to this question would make for a pretty good blog.  So here we go: The first thing one needs to be clear about is what market you want to satisfy.  On the one hand, everyone

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March 28, 2022 2 Comments

Measuring Quality as if Quality Mattered

Last week, a colleague on Twitter (Hi, Brendan!) asked – possibly rhetorically – whether it was possible to measure quality in higher education.  I took the bait and thought I would formulate my response here. Not everyone agrees, but I think in almost every aspect of higher education, quality can be evaluated.  Not always in strictly quantitative ways, but certainly in ways that allow general comparison across similar units or organizations.  But the important thing is that quality needs to

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November 30, 2021 3 Comments

Overqualification

Sorry for the late blog appearance: I’ve been bouncing around Alberta and British Columbia for work and play this week (#ICETECA, baby) and it’s tough to write on these terrible little short-haul flights.  Anyways, today I want to talk about a paper which came out a few weeks ago called Overqualification among 2012 and 2013 bachelor’s graduates, by Statistics Canada’s Diane Galarneau.  “Overqualification” is a fraught topic to define and measure.  This study uses a snapshot of bachelor’s graduates a couple

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November 18, 2021 2 Comments

Canada: Not Quite as Good as It Looks in OECD Comparisons

On Monday, Statscan put out a “Portrait of Youth and Education in Canada,” which includes the following graph accompanied by a note to the effect that Canada has one of the highest post-secondary attainment rates in the world because of our high community colleges/polytechnic participation rates. It was accompanied by the following graph: Figure 1: Highest Level of Educational Attainment, 25 to 34-year-olds, Canada and OECD average 2019, as per Statistics Canada Now, I know this line of argument. I

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October 7, 2021 2 Comments

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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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