Trying to find current statistics about higher education in Canada is often a futile exercise. Educators, researchers, and policy makers have complained repeatedly about the lack of national data. And now the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development can be added to the list of frustrated information seekers. In its recent annual education report comparing more than 40 countries, there were more M’s, for missing data, than actual data entries for Canada.

That pattern, notes Maclean’s magazine, means that “Canada ranked last out of 40 countries in regard to how much higher-education information was available for the report, coming in behind countries such as the U.S.A., Croatia, Chile, and Luxembourg.” Canada, where education is a provincial matter, is the only developed country that does not have a federal education office. But calls for such a federal office have been getting louder and more frequent, with the latest one coming today from the Canadian Federation of Students. —Karen Birchard