Category: PSE Outcomes

New Graduate Outcomes Data

I haven’t written about graduate labour market outcomes recently, and the good folks at the Council of Ontario Universities just published some new data on the class of 2018, so today seems like the day to come back to this topic. The main reason to use Ontario data to do this is because a) it’s available, b) it provides a useful amount of breakdown by discipline and c) it has a nice long time series.  The Statistics Canada Education and

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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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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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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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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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