By Joseph Urgo. Return on investment (ROI) is the latest data fetish to emerge in our ongoing quest to understand why it is we educate ourselves and our children. ROI calculates the cost of a college education and compares that cost to expected earnings by someone who has that educational credential. If a four-year private college degree in History costs $200,000, and the average history major earns $50,000 a year, it takes four years to get that investment back. If a degree in Engineering costs the same, but the engineer earns $100,000 a year, the return is faster. And if the degree costs less, say $60,000 at a public college, that too can speed up the return. More...

This report card benchmarks the provinces and Canada against 15 international peer countries. Version française.
The peer countries are chosen based on three criteria: standard of living, population size, and geographic size (to exclude city-states). They are the most advanced and wealthiest countries in the world. (For more information on how the peer countries were selected, see the methodology section.) This may mean, however, a country that is a leader in one of the performance areas or on select indicators may not be included in the peer group because it did not meet the selection criteria. Singapore and South Korea, for example, were among the top performers on the 2012 student skills test indicators, but are not included in the report card because they do not meet the criteria for inclusion.
A total of 23 indicators are used to assess provincial performance in the Education and Skills category. Comparable international data are available for 21 of these indicators. Like all How Canada Performs report cards, the Education and Skills report card focuses on outcomes. It tells us what countries and provinces are achieving, not what their efforts are. Consequently, education inputs—the human, financial, and material resources channelled into the education system—are not graded. More...

The Heads of University Management & Administration Network in Europe (HUMANE) Annual Conference entitled “Measuring the University's Performance: Data for Decisions”, will take place at the University of Latvia in Riga from 27 to 28 June 2014.
The conference discussions will look at how to “support decision-making processes at universities, how to obtain, process and save data and how to use data better for decision making”. The event is open to all university professionals.
For more information about this event and how to register, please click here. More...

German Education Minister Johanna Wanka commended Wednesday the achievement of German universities on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the Bologna Declaration.
"Over the past 15 years, the German universities have carried out a tremendous achievement," said Johanna Wanka. "Bachelor and master degree programs are now firmly anchored in the German science system, now we have to go on the path of reform consistently."
Fifteen years ago, on June 19, 1999, 29 European countries signed the so-called Bologna Declaration in the Italian university town of Bologna. The European higher education reform has led to far-reaching changes in the national higher education systems in Europe since then and Germany has actively followed this process from the beginning. More...