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Tag: Demographics

World Youth Population Projections

I have been thinking a lot lately about the longer-term future of higher education and how demographics will change the nature of the sector. Today I want to share some data and thoughts on this subject.  My basic observations are that 1) whatever else it may do, higher education exists mainly for young adults, and 2) the world’s complement of young people has already more or less topped out. We might be able to increase participation rates, but “peak 18-21”

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March 16, 2026 No Comments

Crowding Out

In previous blogs, I discussed how Canadian colleges and universities are generating bad vibes by exacerbating various housing crises.  This has been bad for pretty much the entire sector.  These strategies have contributed to the impression that the leaders of our post-secondary sector are putting their own institutional interests ahead of the communities they inhabit.  It’s not a good look, but for the moment, I think it is survivable from a credibility/responsible neighbour point of view, if only because federal

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November 8, 2023 2 Comments

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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October 30, 2023 3 Comments

Demography, Incentives, and the Future of Canadian PSE

Let’s start with a little history. Figure 1 shows the evolution of the youth population (aged 18-21) in Canada from 1971 to 2022.   The remarkable thing here is that this demographic group peaked over 40 years ago.  What that means is that pretty much all the nearly tripled increase in domestic enrolments in the last four have come from increasing participation rates rather than population growth. Figure 1: Population Aged 18-21, by Region, Canada, 1971-2022 This growth has not been

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September 25, 2023 3 Comments

Demography is Not Destiny, But….

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, first, Canada is facing something of a demographic trough with respect to young people, and second, that this the reason domestic enrolment at the post-secondary level is slumping.  Except, no.  The first was true 10-15 years ago, and while the second might still be true, it’s about to change in a hurry.  I wrote about reversing demographic trends a couple of years ago, but everyone could use an update because change in this

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October 31, 2022 2 Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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