Tuition and Living Accomodation Costs for Full-Time Students (TLAC) Survey

Question

I will be providing this survey data to a researcher at my institution, but first I have a few questions about the information itself.

1. Table 3 in the xls file entitled Tables 1-8 2009-2010 Prelim.xls contains the information about tuition fees for foreign students that I am looking for. However, I notice that the questionnaire itself asks respondents to indicate whether they are reporting tuition fees at their institution per academic year, semester, per credit or other. It appears as if the $ values reported in the spreadsheet represent tuition fees per academic year, but I would like to confirm whether this is correct.

2. Based on the title of this excel spreadsheet, I am assuming that this is preliminary data and that a final report will be available at some point? When will this be available? Also, when will the data for 2010-2011 be available?

3. This is just a comment: Being a new DLI rep, I have much to learn. I was not expecting to find the results of this survey in an excel spreadsheet. (I assumed that the survey data was usually made available for SPSS).

Answer

Thank you for your questions about TLAC. We couldn't locate a file titled Tables 1-8 2009-2010 Prelim.xls. but suspect that you were referring to the file Tables 1-7 2009-2010Prelim.xls.

I spoke with our contacts for TLAC and they confirmed that:

1) The reference period for the data in the TLAC tables is the academic year. (After speaking with our contact I noticed that additional explanatory notes which may be of interest are available in the Footnotes tab of the spreadsheet.)

2) The DLI should be receiving final 2009-2010 and preliminary 2010-2011 TLAC data at the beginning of October. I will be sending out an announcement as soon as they are available on our FTP and website. Some final 2009-2010 and preliminary 2010-2011 TLAC data are scheduled to be released on Sept. 16 (there will be an announcement in The Daily) but we won't be receiving our tables until a few weeks later as we receive a wider set of tables that won't all be ready until the beginning of October.

3) You are correct that many of the data files in the DLI collection need to be consulted with statistical analysis applications such as SPSS. This applies to the public use microdata files (PUMFs) in our collection. The DLI collection also includes a large number of aggregate data files, many of which are in the areas of justice and education. Most of these aggregate data products are available in Excel format or Beyond 20/20 format. For additional information on aggregate data and microdata, you may be interested in the following section of the DLI Survival Guide which discusses different types of data (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/dli-ild/guide-trousse/guide-trousse/toc-tdm/3000276-eng.htm#diffagg).

I hope that this information is helpful. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions.