By . Let’s look first at employment rates 6 months after graduation by field of study (I include only the six largest – Business/Commerce, Education, Engineering, Humanities, Physical Sciences and Social Sciences – because otherwise these graphs would be an utter mess), shown below in Figure 1. As was the case yesterday, the dates along the x-axis are the cohort graduation year. More...
Ever-bleaker Graduate Employment Data?
By . So just before I quit blogging in December, the Council of Ontario Universities released its annual survey of graduate outcomes, this time of the class of 2013. The release contained the usual platitudes: “future is bright”, “vast majority getting well-paying jobs”, etc etc. And I suppose if one looks at a single year’s results in isolation, one can make that case. But a look at longer-term trends suggests cause for concern. More...
Restore the NGS!
By . One of the best things that Statistics Canada ever did in the higher education field was the National Graduates’ Survey (NGS). OK, it wasn’t entirely Statscan – NGS has never been a core product funded from the Statscan budget but rather funded periodically by Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) or HRDC or HRSDC or whatever earlier version of the department you care to name – but they were the ones doing the execution. More...
Post-Brexit Options
By . One highly amusing by-product of the frantic Canada-EU-Walloon trade negotiation finale last fall was watching the UK government suddenly realize that negotiating agreements with a 27-country trade bloc is actually really difficult and that this Brexit thing is almost certainly not going to end well. Which of course has some reasonably significant implications for UK universities. But how exposed are UK universities to Brexit. More...
Admissions policies: Marks-Based, Broad-Based, or Random?
By . Though here in egalitarian Canada we don’t like to talk about it much, the fact of the matter is that universities are selective. More people want to enter them than there are places available. The more prestigious the institution, the greater the imbalance between demand and supply of places, thus requiring more challenging and discerning barriers to entry (though self-selection reduces actual application numbers somewhat). The question is: on what basis should we select students. More...
The Politicization of University Accounting
By . Back in the fall, the Canadian Alliance of University Teachers (CAUT) published an interesting little guidebook called CAUT’s Guide to Analyzing University & College Financial Statements, written by Cameron and Janet Morrill, two profs at the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business. Stripped to its essentials, it purports to be a DIY guide for faculty to help hold their institutions to account over finances. More...
Welcome 2017
By . The first half of this year is going to be dominated by two issues: Science and Skills. This month, former University of Toronto President David Naylor will release his review of the Government of Canada’s Science Policies. There were a lot of high hopes for this report, some of which are likely going to be disappointed when it actually comes out. More...
Winter Is Here: EdTech investments and M&A dropped significantly in 2016
By Phil Hill. With the long-term rise in Ed Tech investments – starting in roughly 2007 – many analysts have been predicting a fall for several years. Maybe not a bubble burst like we saw in 2001, but a real drop in activity and volume. More...