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Tag: Employment

The Upskilling for Industry Initiative

Q.  I can’t keep track any more.  What’s this big new skills initiative that got some press a couple of weeks ago? A. The 2021 Budget contained a commitment to fund “an initiative to scale-up proven industry-led, third-party delivered approaches to upskill and redeploy workers to meet the needs of growing industries”.   Industry, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) had a competition to figure out who will deliver it, much like they had a competition to figure out how to

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March 7, 2023 No Comments

A More Nuanced Look at Graduate Incomes

It’s all-Council-of-Ontario-Universities this week on the blog, but that’s because they’re the ones putting out the great data.  Today, it’s the annual survey on graduate outcomes which looks at how bachelor’s degree graduates are faring in the labour market.  Standard caveat: Ontario =/= Canada, but it produces nearly half the country’s bachelor degrees so it’s bound to be close to the national average and the trends you see here are unlikely to be much different that those you see anywhere else. Figure 1 shows

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January 25, 2018 No Comments

Cognitive Dissonance in Academia

On a pretty regular basis, some academic or other pens a piece in the popular press talking about overproduction of PhDs.  Take for example this 2015 Jonathan Wolff piece in the Guardian with a  piece entitled “Doctor, doctor we’re suffering from a glut of PhDs who can’t find academic jobs” in which he obsesses about a figures in a 2010 Royal Society document suggesting that of 200 people who complete a PhD only seven will get a permanent academic post and one will become

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November 13, 2017 1 Comment

Bad Numbers

I like to name and shame people who are playing fast and loose with numbers.  Usually, this involves taking one “true” data point and then using it to make a point which is unwarranted by the data in context.  A couple of examples caught my eye last week. First up: “Students have at most a 1 in 4 chance that the person at the front of the classroom is a full-time faculty member”. This is the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternative’s

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October 31, 2017 9 Comments

An Amazing Statscan Skills Study

I’ve been hard on Statscan lately because of their mostly-inexcusable data collection practices.  But every once in awhile the organization redeems itself.  This week, that redemption takes the form of an Analytical Studies Branch research paper by Marc Frenette and Kristyn Frank entitled Do Postsecondary Graduates Land High-Skilled Jobs?  The implications of this paper are pretty significant, but also nuanced and susceptible to over-interpretation.  So let’s go over in detail what this paper’s about. The key question Frenette & Frank

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January 26, 2017 4 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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