Higher Education Data Glasnost

By Alex Usher. Many people complain that there is a lack of post-secondary data in Canada.  But this is actually not true.  There are tons of data about; it’s just that institutions won’t share or publish much of it.
Let me tell you a little story.  Once upon a time, there was a small, public-minded higher education research company that wanted to create the equivalent of Statistics Canada’s university tuition fee index for colleges.  The company had completed a project like this before, but had done so in a somewhat imprecise way because of the time and effort involved in getting enrollment data necessary to weight the program-level tuition data. More...