Category: Students

Students on the Frontlines: The Ongoing Protests in Serbia with Jim Dickinson

If I say the word “Serbia”, chances are your mind goes to things like the NATO air attacks of 1999 and the associated Kosovo War, to the breakup of Yugoslavia and to Marshal Tito and maybe – if you’re more historically-minded – to the origins of World War I.  It probably doesn’t go to higher education or radical student politics. But that’s kind of unfortunate because in fact Serbia’s recent history has had plenty of instances where youth- or student-based

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Fun with Participation Rate Data

Just a quick one today, mostly charts. Back in the fall, StatsCan released a mess of data from the Labour Force Survey looking at education participation rates—that is, the percentage of any given age cohort that is attending education—over the past 25 years. So, let’s go see what it says. Figure 1 shows total education participation rates, across all levels of education, from age 15 to 29, for selected years over the past quarter century. At the two ends of

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Representing Students: Crisis Edition

The three of us are ex-student leaders. And we’ve been thinking a bit lately about how student leaders can meet the present moment in higher education. One of us vividly remembers the meeting which formalized the creation of the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA) thirty years ago this week in Fredericton, New Brunswick (you can easily guess which of us it was because the other two weren’t born yet). To a significant extent, CASA defined itself in opposition to

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Student Debt by Ethnicity

Hi all. Just a quick one today, this time on some data I recently got from StatsCan. We know a fair a bit about student debt in Canada, especially with respect to distribution by gender, type of institution, province, etc. (Chapter 6 of The State of Postsecondary Education in Canada is just chock full of this kind of data if you’re minded to take a deeper dive). But to my knowledge no one has ever pulled and published the data

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OECD Education at a Glance, 2024

Last Tuesday, the OECD published Education at a Glance, 2024. As usual, there is a whack of interesting comparative data in there—more than usual, actually, as I will show you in a second (and Canadian data is for the most part not missing, which is pretty great). However, I do want to say that the data on Canadian tertiary education finance shows a puzzling and steep decline which I can’t replicate using any data issued in Canada. For the moment,

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