Category: Students

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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Does Time-to-Completion Matter?

One thing you occasionally hear from governments is complaints about the inefficiency of post-secondary education programs. This is distinct from the questions around inefficiency of post-secondary institutions, which is usually code for “those damn profs are making too much money.” The argument about program inefficiency usually goes something like this: “It’s an [X]-year program! Why are students taking [X+1] or [X + 2] years to complete. That’s inefficient! A waste of money! We need to get students through these programs

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Eating the Future

As anyone who was alive at the time knows, if you want to pick a decade when Canada was at its nadir, it was the 1990s. We managed to have a currency crisis, a fiscal crisis, a national unity crisis, and a recession which basically lasted seven years. It was bleak, bleak, bleak. But in one very important way, it was better than today. Because at least, even though we were broke (both Saskatchewan and Newfoundland flirted with bankruptcy in

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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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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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