Category: Students

20 Years of Data on Canadian Undergraduate Students – Part 1

Co-authored with Tiffany MacLennan Last week, I examined undergraduate student debt using data from the triennial survey of graduating students undertaken by the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC).  Today and tomorrow, along with Tiffany MacLennan (one of HESA’s many rockstar analysts), I am going to put that same data source to use to look at other aspects of university financing. So, just to remind everyone: CUSC is a 20-something year-old coalition of the willing, which is roughly 30-odd institutions who

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Inter-provincial Student Mobility

We talk a lot about international student mobility in Canada.  But what about inter-provincial student mobility?  Let’s go find out. In 2018-19, the last year for which data is available, the proportion of Canadian undergraduates who were studying in another province was about 8.4%.  As Figure 1 shows, this proportion has been increasing very slowly for the last thirty years (the precipitous drop in 1996-97 has to do with Quebec universities not reporting data in that year, something which I am pretty

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Customers

On the off chance you’re wandering through the halls of academia (non-COVID halls, anyway) and feel like picking a fight with another wanderer, the best advice I can give you is to use these three words: “students” “are” “customers”. See?  Half of you probably want to fight me right now.  But what I want to argue today is that while there are circumstances where that three-word statement is untrue, for the most part it is not untrue in the way

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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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Examining Learning Experiences During COVID

Written in collaboration with Michael Sullivan Good morning, all.  Today’s blog is a collaboration with my colleague Michael Sullivan at the Strategic Counsel (with whom we at HESA Towers have been doing some joint projects over the past year or so) and it’s about the results of a new recently completed survey, which looks at students’ learning experiences since the start of this academic year.  It’s an interesting half-full half-empty story, but with some very important future implications. Figure 1

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