With most of the world undergoing a serious bout of youth unemployment, there’s been a lot of focus on graduate earnings and whether or not we are “overproducing” graduates. As I’ve noted before, some of this talk is nonsense, but given the times, the focus on outcomes isn’t surprising.

Don’t tell Margaret Wente, but in China the government is actively cutting majors that don’t produce high levels of post-graduation employment. In the U.S., there’s an increasing number of stories (like this one from the Wall Street Journal) trying to point graduates to the “right” disciplines in a tight labour market. As others have pointed out in fact, a lot of the highest disciplinary rates – the ones that really attract attention – actually have really small enrolments. What the data really shows is that graduates of nearly all fields of study in America have unemployment rates lower than those of non-graduates (something that isn’t true in China).

Turning to Canada, we’re clearly doing better than most in terms of unemployment. What we’re not doing so well is producing timely data on graduate outcomes (doesn’t that WSJ data make you drool?). Our best data comes from the National Graduates Survey – which looks at people who graduated in 2005. Not much use in today’s environment.

Admittedly, this kind of data is expensive to collect via surveys, and that’s why a budget-challenged Statistics Canada isn’t rushing out to do more. More data may be available when the National Household Survey results arrive in 2013, but it’s still not clear how useful that survey will be.

But there’s another way to get this data. Statscan has information on nearly all Canadian students in its Post-Secondary Student Information System (PSIS). It is possible, using probabilistic matching, to link this data to the Longitudinal Administrative Database (LAD), which is a database containing the complete tax records of one out of every five taxfilers. With that kind of link, it is possible to get continuous, year-by-year updates on how well students are doing in the labour market, and to report it however we want, even by field of study.

A PSIS-LAD link would give us high-quality, timely, policy-relevant labour-market data – all with no new data collection costs. Can someone explain why we aren’t doing this already?