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Category: PSE Outcomes

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 1 Comment

More on Measuring Social Mobility

There have been some interesting recent developments with respect to measuring the contribution that universities make to social mobility.  Not in Canada of course – that would require caring about education outcomes or having any capacity for measuring and reporting data on socio-economic mobility – but rather in the UK and the US.  Let me take you on a quick tour of what’s going on and what is being learned. Back in 2017, the John Bates Clark-award-winning economist Raj Chetty

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May 31, 2021 No Comments

Failing to Look Outward

A few years ago, whilst working in an Eastern European country which shall remain nameless, I went to visit the school’s premier school of agriculture to ask them some questions about how their graduates were faring in the labour market.  “Well,” they told me, “we take this very seriously.  We do a lot of surveys of graduates and employers.” “Really,” I said.  “And what do these surveys tell you?” “They were very disappointing,” came the reply.  “It turns out that

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February 1, 2021 3 Comments

The Decline of the Master’s Degree

The Master’s degree has a long and complicated history – one that looks very different depending on the part of the world you are from. Briefly: it is either a traditional first degree (e.g. central Europe), a traditional second degree (e.g. here in Canada), a traditional booby-prize for not getting a doctorate (still in some places in the US) or, weirdly, something after a BA, a waiting period of a few years, and the payment of a small fee.  It is

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January 11, 2021 2 Comments

When Science Outruns Business

I have a few projects where I keep seeing the same problem again and again.  And it’s a real poser because it’s a problem that the literature on knowledge and economic development mostly passes over.  It goes like this: Universities play an important role in local economies for two reasons.  The first is that they provide a stream of talented graduates which, in theory, acts as a honeytrap for capital.  The second is that the flow of information between institutions

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December 8, 2020 1 Comment

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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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