Category: Students

A Smart Paper on Access and Persistence

Last week Statistics Canada came out with a damn good paper on post-secondary access and persistence which I thought was worth highlighting. The paper is called Enrollment and Persistence in Postsecondary Education Among High School Graduates in British Columbia: A Focus on Special Needs Students, and it was written by Allison Leanage and Rubab Arim. It was made possible by linking together two databases: the Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS), which contains unit-record data on all post-secondary students in Canada

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Students and the Labour Market: It’s Better Than You Think

I was playing around with Labour Force Survey data this past weekend (as one does) and found some stuff worth sharing. Ready? Let’s go. First, let’s look at student employment rates. One of those things that “everyone knows” is that student employment levels are continually rising. Bur in fact this is anything but true: data shows that the employment rate of full-time students, at around 40%, is pretty much what it has been since the turn of the century. There

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COVID, PISA and So On

A few weeks ago, I was at a session which brought together several folks in the enrollment management business.  It was kind of an open-mike session, in which people could bring up topics that seemed most troubling and most in need of addressing.  So, the topic turned immediately to the preparedness (or more accurately the lack thereof) of incoming students.  Pretty much without exception, from the most to least selective institutions in the room, there was consensus that this was

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Visible Minority Students in Canadian Post-Secondary Education

Kudos today to Statistics Canada, which is gradually producing useful information using its new Education and Labour Market Longitudinal Platform (ELMLP).  Last Thursday it put out – weirdly, in conditions of almost total secrecy – a new set of tables looking at visible minorities and ethnicity in Canadian post-secondary education. This dataset required linking individual record data from the Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS), which does not record any data about ethnicity, with individual record data from the census, which

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A Brief Look at International Students in Canada, Part 2

Yesterday, we looked at what and where international students studied in Canada. Today, I want to zero in a bit on where international students are from. Let’s start with the issue of country of origin.  Care is required because the data gets a bit tricky: there are something like 135,000 students in Canada who are of dual origin. They are Canadian students, but they also have citizenship in another country.  In this post I will focus on the nation or

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