Morning all.  No podcast today: we had some scheduling difficulties that require us to switch up Monday’s blog to today, and the interview on Saudi Arabia with Annalisa Pavan to Monday.  Our apologies.

Earlier this week, the good folks at Statscan released i) a pretty cool infographic about students in private post-secondary education in Canada and ii) a remarkably nerdy piece, technically a report on a “pilot project,” about how they came up with the numbers in the infographic.  Strangely, it didn’t publish any of the data in a tabular format, but we’ll leave that aside because this data is interesting for reasons both wonkish and policy-related.

Let’s start with the wonkery.  By design, Canada has never had any kind of freaking clue how many students attend private post-secondary education institutions.  Provinces, who regulate private post-secondary institutions, do have some clue.  Usually, as a condition of licensing, private colleges are required to provide some kind of information about student numbers.  Not that provinces bother publishing such data – because God forbid anyone make data public.   But they have it.  But Canada as a whole?  No.  Neither Statistics Canada nor any other part of the Government of Canada has any reason to be in contact with private institutions, so there is no opportunity to ask them about their student numbers.  Statscan used to have some sense of the number of private post-secondary institutions in the country, because it kept a register.  But it stopped doing this about 30 years ago, IIRC.  So, our cluelessness wasn’t just about private post-secondary students, but about private post-secondary institutions as well. 

(The feds could have been obtaining administrative data to work out private school numbers for years, simply by requiring institutions wishing to benefit from the Canada Student Financial Assistance Program (CSFAP) to provide data annually to Statistics Canada on enrolments, graduations and what not.  Easy Peasey.  But they never did that.)

In 2019, however, the Canada Revenue Agency decided to start making every post-secondary institute file a certificate every time they issued a tuition tax credit.  What this meant was that suddenly there was a new source of data to be exploited.  Not only could one count the number of institutions, but also the number of students for whom tax certificates had been issued.  And then, linking that data to more general tax information (a comprehensive Statscan file known as the T1FF), it was possible then to get information about the gender and age of individuals who received such credits. And this, in turn, allows some basic comparisons between the private post-secondary student body and that in public institutions.  Statistics Canada has now done all of this through the pilot project published last week.

They found the following:

·       340,280 students attended a private post-secondary institution for at least three weeks in the 2020 calendar year.  This is compared to around 2.8 million individuals in the public post-secondary system.  This latter number is about a third higher than the numbers you tend to see for public post-secondary education such as in HESA’s annual State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada, partly because it is a different method of counting (year-round instead of a once-a-year snapshot) and covers a slightly different population. My impression is that the tax includes everyone paying tuition, not just those in academic programs, so all the continuing education students are in here as well.  This means that 11% of all post-secondary students are at private institutions.

·       There are 1,150 private post-secondary institutions.  I would treat this one with a bit of caution.  Ontario alone lists over 3,000 such institutions in its open data sets.  Some of the difference probably comes from many institutions having more than one location or campus.  Rules around this can be complicated even on the public side: note, for instance, that University of New Brunswick and University of British Columbia with their multiple campuses are both treated as one institution while l’Université du Québec campuses are usually each treated as separate.  But basically, take it as read that the vast majority of post-secondary institutions in Canada – 85% or some from Statscan’s calculations – are private.

·       The concentration of private institutions and enrolments are largest in BC and Ontario.

·       The male/female split is reasonably similar in public and private institutions.  But women are slightly more likely than men to enrol in private institutions. 

·       Students in private institutions are older than those in public institutions.  Over three-quarters of students in private institutions were aged twenty-five or above, compared to 43% in public institutions.

I wouldn’t say that much of this comes as a surprise.  The headline number of 380,000 is a bit higher than I would have pegged it, but the rest are all close to the ballpark I would have put them in had you asked me a week ago.  But it’s nice to have it in numbers. So good on Statscan for moving relatively quickly to turn some raw tax data into usable numbers. 

Now they just need to turn this from a pilot project into an annual data release so we can watch for trends.