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Category: Research

A New Alberta Postsecondary Review

The week before last, the Alberta Minister of Advanced Education, Rajan Sawhney announced a funding review for Alberta post-secondary education. I saw a fair bit of snarky comment about this on social media which I thought was kind of unfair. (Note to followers: now that Bluesky actually has passed the minimum viable size to be a useful social media platform, you’ll mostly find me there rather than Twitter. My address is: @alexusherhesa.bsky.social). So, let’s break it down a bit. The

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November 18, 2024 2 Comments

Estimating Employment in the Higher Education Sector

For many years, I have been making the point that Canada has very little good data on employment in the higher education sector. We have a national annual tally, based on administrative data, of ranked academic faculty in universities from a system called UCASS, or the University and College Academic Staff Survey (don’t let the title fool you, it’s really only universities). Beyond that—data on non-academic staff, or any national data at all on colleges—is basically bupkis. Except, that’s not

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October 9, 2024 1 Comment

The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada, 2024

Morning all. It’s the Wednesday after Labour Day and that means, as usual, that it’s release day for The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, by Janet Balfour and yours truly (with a big assist from Jiwoo Jeon). You can download it in all its glory here. In many recent years, I have used this document to talk about international students and the increasing role they play in Canadian post-secondary finance, but I figure you guys have probably heard that

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September 4, 2024 3 Comments

A Research Agenda for Canadian Higher Education, Part 2

Just a note that I am at the CAUBO Conference in Montreal today…if you are attending, do drop by my session today after lunch and say “hi.” Yesterday I sketched out a possible research agenda for Canadian higher education. Today, I am going to sketch out how we can best achieve this. What needs to be done at the National level The most important thing we could do is replace the Youth In Transition Survey. This was a longitudinal survey which followed

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June 5, 2024 1 Comment

A Research Agenda for Canadian Higher Education, Part 1

There is so much about Canadian higher education that we don’t know. Today, a list of the most important unknowns that I think are most important, organized by broad topic. Who Gets Into Post-Secondary Education: Also, Where and Why and For How Long? Our data on who gets into post-secondary education has got a little bit better in the last little while. For instance, check out this interesting piece by Tomasz Handler, Aneta Bonikowska and Marc Frenette which looks at Bachelor’s degree

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June 4, 2024 3 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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