By Alex Usher. Back about 15 years ago, the relevant technology for email surveys became sufficiently cheap and ubiquitous that everyone started using them.  I mean, everyone.  So what has happened over the last decade and a half has been a proliferation of surveys and with it – surprise, surprise – a steady decline in survey response rates.  We know that these low-participation surveys (nearly all are below 50%, and most are below 35%) are reliable, in the sense that they give us similar results year after year.  But we have no idea whether they are accurate, because we have no way of dealing with response bias. More...

By Alex Usher. Like many people, I am in favour of better data on the higher education sector.  But while this call unites a lot of people, there is remarkably little thinking that goes into the question of how to achieve it.  This is a problem, because unless we arrive at a better common understanding of both the cost and the utility of different kinds of data, we are going to remain stuck in our current position. More...

By Alex Usher. A couple of week ago, CBC decided to make a big deal about how terrible Canadian universities were for not collecting data on race (see Why so many Canadian universities Know so little about their own racial diversity). As you all know, I’m a big proponent of better data in higher education. But the effort involved in getting new data has to be in some way proportional to the benefit derived from that data. And I’m pretty sure this doesn’t meet that test.
In higher education, there are only two points where it is easy to collect data from students: at the point of application, and at the point of enrolment. More...