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Tag: Demographics

Students Won’t Save Us This Time

 I do a fair bit of barnstorming around Canada giving talks on higher education finance.  My audiences, by and large, split into two groups: those that remember the cuts of the late 90s and those that don’t.  The ones who don’t remember them are mostly OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD about future funding challenges (especially when I show them that – contrary to their belief – that operating income has actually been going up sharply recently).  The ones who do remember are more perplexed:

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April 14, 2015 No Comments

It’s Not Just Demographics

The Council of Ontario Universities (COU) released an amusingly defensive press release last month, just after the high school applications deadline.  After a glancing acknowledgment that applications to university are down in the province for the second year in a row, we are earnestly told: DEMOGRAPHICS!  APPLICATIONS WAY UP IF YOU USE 2000 AS A BASE YEAR!  JOBS!  DEMOGRAPHICS!  MORE JOBS!  DID WE MENTION DEMOGRAPHICS? I guess COU views itself as a prophylactic against negative press coverage that secondary school applicants

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February 5, 2015 5 Comments

Cultural Determinants of Data Acquisition Costs

I saw a fascinating piece in the New York Times awhile back.  It was about a trend at American universities, asking applicants if they were gay or not.  Apparently, these institutions believe that by asking students this question, they are sending a message that they are a gay-positive environment. Interesting. Americans think that transparency about identity is the path to utopia.  Enrolment statistics by race?  They’ve got them.  Indeed, they are required to keep such statistics, because of a clutch of laws

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September 19, 2013 3 Comments

Revisiting the Looming Labour Shortage Theory (Part 2)

Yesterday, we saw that if one replaces a steady-state assumption about the work-habits of older workers, with a graph that extends recent trends in employment for that age demographic into the near future, then total employment projections rise by 2.1 million over 20 years, more or less wiping out the whole “future labour shortage” theory. Future Employment Rates, Based on Different Assumptions About Employment Rates Among Workers Over 55               So what are the

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May 15, 2013 No Comments

The Changing Employment Picture: Old vs. Young?

I was playing around with CANSIM data on the weekend, when I saw something quite interesting regarding employment rates by age.  Check this out: Figure 1 Employment Rates by Age Group               Although it’s common-talk to say that we’re still in hard times, in fact, employment rates among the core working-age population are near an all-time high – 81.6% is the highest rate on record, apart from 2007 and 2008; it’s a full eight

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May 6, 2013 3 Comments

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