The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on people all over the world and Ontario is no exception. While some were able to shift to working from home, many people lost their jobs; the province’s unemployment rate more than doubled from 5.5% in February to 13.6% in May. As we continue to navigate life […]
Tag: Data Gaps
Data Gaps
In a paper we published earlier this year, we wrote that access to postsecondary education starts early in the educational pathway, and isn’t an equal race for everyone. We know that youth from low-income and first-generation backgrounds (those whose parents did not go to postsecondary) have a particularly difficult time getting in. But what happens […]
Ontario’s approach to increasing equity of access to postsecondary education (PSE) follows a certain structured if faulty logic: Identify students who are not going to college, university or into apprenticeships, and then create supports to help them access PSE and succeed once there. Sounds good, right? Sounds logical? Except there are (at least) two big […]
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Martin Hicks — Data Done Right!
In an excellent new paper, David Trick and Jinli Yang analyze Ontario’s existing surveys of college and university graduates, and look ahead to imagine the next generation of performance metrics for our public institutions. The surveys have been running for almost 20 years. Trick and Yang note that the data is of broad interest to […]
We recently asked Ontario universities for some data that would allow us to calculate how much salaries paid to continuing full-time faculty have been increasing in recent years. We did not ask for individual records, of course, — we understand personal privacy — but only aggregations at the institutional and provincial level. The universities said […]
With Thursday’s unveiling of the 2017 provincial budget, we’re reminded that last year’s budget included an announcement (with great fanfare) of reforms to the Ontario Student Assistance Program, or OSAP. Those reforms were designed to encourage and support more low-income youth to attend postsecondary education, and, as HEQCO has said before, that’s a really great […]
Sentient robots used to be the creatures of science fiction novels, but the future is here. Artificial intelligence quietly recommends the next movie in your Netflix queue, it reminds you of the fastest routes to work just before you leave the house, and it recognizes your face in a selfie and automatically focuses your camera […]
One of the most important lessons I learned in graduate school is that evidence and data matter. So, when there is a problem to be solved, a challenge to be met, or a strategy or policy to be designed, thinking should be informed, shaped and guided by the best evidence, data and information available. Regrettably, […]
Those of us focused on facts rather than anecdotes have known all along that the alleged collapse of employment opportunities for higher education graduates is untrue. At HEQCO, we have published on this. And now comes a major breakthrough, a significant step forward, in our data-driven understanding of outcomes for Canadian college and university graduates. […]