NB-IRDT Graduate Retention Series

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https://unbscholar.lib.unb.ca/handle/1882/38208
New Brunswick invests substantially in educating its students. These reports examine graduate retention rates and factors that may be influencing New Brunswickers' decisions to stay and work in the province.

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Browsing NB-IRDT Graduate Retention Series by Subject "Sociology"

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    Graduate retention in New Brunswick: 2019 and 2020 cohort update
    (New Brunswick Institute for Research, Data and Training, 2023-01) Balzer, Andy; McDonald, Ted; Miah, Pablo; Mokhtar, Rawia
    This report is the first in a series of annual updates on post-secondary graduates’ retention in New Brunswick (NB) that will be released by the New Brunswick Institute for Research, Data and Training (NB-IRDT) each year. These reports provide an overview of NB graduates’ retention patterns since the previous reporting period, and these periodic updates on graduates’ retention trends can help guide public policy discussions around education and training strategies to attract youth to study, work, and live in NB. The current study, which looks at 2019 and 2020 graduate cohorts, updates the graduate retention results published by Bhuiyan et al. (2020), which considered individuals who graduated as recently as 2018. However, two changes in methodology used in this report mean that results presented here are not directly comparable to the previous results (Bhuiyan et al., 2020). The first change is that in this report, the data on university graduates come from the Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission (MPHEC), rather than the universities themselves. Though graduation numbers are very close between the two sources, data matching rates are lower with the new source. Second, a more conservative definition of retention is adopted in this report, whereby changes in Medicare status prior to an individual’s graduation date are used to assess retention post-graduation. These methodological changes are discussed in more detail in the report, but the net result is that estimated retention rates in this report are somewhat lower than comparable results in the previous report. We therefore present the full historical series of retention rates so that changes over time can be assessed using a consistent methodology.
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    Graduate retention in New Brunswick: 2021 graduate cohort update
    (New Brunswick Institute for Research, Data and Training, 2024-06) McDonald, Ted; Miah, Pablo; Beykzadeh, Ali; Gorman-Asal, Madeleine
    This report is the third in a series of annual updates on post-secondary graduates’ retention in New Brunswick (NB) by the New Brunswick Institute for Research, Data and Training (NB-IRDT). These reports provide an overview of the retention patterns of graduates from post-secondary institutions in NB since the previous reporting period, and their updates on graduates’ retention trends can help guide public policy discussions around education and training strategies to attract younger individuals to study, work and live in NB. The current study, which includes data on the 2021 graduate cohort, provides an update to the graduate retention results released by NB-IRDT in 2023 (Balzer et al., 2023), which included data on individuals who graduated in 2019 and 2020. The methodology followed by Balzer et al. (2023) was replicated for this cohort update.
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    Graduate retention in New Brunswick: Supplementary report on graduates in social work
    (New Brunswick Institute for Research, Data and Training, 2023-05) Jones, Bethany; McDonald, Ted; Miah, Pablo
    In January 2023, the New Brunswick Institute for Research, Data and Training released a report called Graduate retention in New Brunswick: 2019 and 2020 cohort update (Balzer et al.), 1 which gave an overview of post-secondary graduates’ retention patterns, disaggregated by their field of study. While this provided many valuable insights into graduates’ education and mobility decisions, the fields of study examined were purposely broad. This allowed for comparison between graduates of programs in arts, science, business, and healthcare, for instance, but it did not allow for a narrower focus on the outcomes of graduates of specific fields of interest. In New Brunswick, social work is one such field of interest. The retention of social work graduates 2 is an important topic in the public sphere, as social work has been identified as the second highest profession in need of a recruitment and retention strategy in New Brunswick, and pre-pandemic projections suggest the province could have a shortage of 272 social workers by 2030 (New Brunswick Association of Social Workers [NBASW], 2022). Given the increased demand for social workers since the start of COVID-19, this shortage could be even greater (NBASW, 2022). This study focuses on the retention of social work graduates in New Brunswick and acts as a supplement to the earlier work by Balzer et al. (2023), using the same data and methodology but further breaking down the field of study category to examine social work specifically. The findings in this report provide an overview of social work graduates’ demographic backgrounds and mobility decisions and can help guide public policy discussions around education and training strategies to retain social workers in NB. 1 Graduate retention in New Brunswick: 2019 and 2020 cohort update (Balzer et al., 2023) 2 In this report, we refer to graduates of university social work programs and college social service community worker programs as “social work graduates.”
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    Student transition to post-secondary education in New Brunswick: 2014-2019 high school graduates
    (New Brunswick Institute for Research, Data and Training, 2022-05) Gorman-Asal, Madeleine; McDonald, Ted; Miah, Pablo; Mokhtar, Rawia
    This study examines the transition of NB high school graduates to post-secondary education (PSE) in New Brunswick from 2014-2017, drawing on enrolment and graduation data from the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (EECD) and seven public post-secondary institutions. The study considers both students who enter post-secondary education shortly after high school graduation and those who delay entry. It also estimates high school graduation rates and the retention rate of non-pursuers in the province. Understanding the transition decisions of NB high school graduates can help identify where barriers to higher education exist in the province so that investments in PSE can support reducing barriers to educational attainment for New Brunswickers.