University Rankings: Canada
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Maclean’s University Ranking
The most prominent, influential and widely cited university ranking in Canada has been published by Macleans, a weekly general interest news magazine, since 1991. The annual Maclean’s University Ranking sorts public universities under three categories: Primarily Undergraduate (schools with few or no graduate programs), Comprehensive (schools with an undergraduate focus, but offering a wide range of graduate programs), and Medical Doctorate (schools with a heavy emphasis on research). Alongside private universities, schools with fewer than 1,000 full-time students or those with a strictly religious or specialized mission are not ranked.
As the most influential ranking of Canadian universities, the ranking has received its fair share of criticism. A collection of papers critiquing the Maclean’s ranking, and published by the University of Calgary.
Methodology
Schools are assessed on a range of factors that are grouped into six broad groupings. In total, Primarily Undergraduate universities are ranked on 22 performance indicators, Comprehensive universities on 23 and Medical-Doctoral universities on 24 — resulting in slightly different weightings for some performance measures. Table 1 presents the factors, indicators and weightings used for the 2006 ranking.
The main source of data for the Maclean’s university ranking is gathered from the results of a questionnaire that is sent out to all public universities every summer. For the indicators “Reputation,” “Student Awards,” and “Faculty Awards” data is collected from other sources. A value is then assigned to the data collected for the various different indicators and then weighted according to the criteria weighting (as a percentage of the overall university score).
While the specifics of the survey results and the methodology are not revealed by Macleans in their entirety, the response rate is reported. For the 2006 rankings exercise, the response rate was only 11.1 percent of 11,620 solicitations — a figure that has been criticized by some as being “very unsatisfactory given the considerable weight accorded to the results1”.
Maclean’s conducts a separate survey of high school guidance counselors, university officials, heads of a wide variety of national and regional organizations, CEOs and recruiters at large and small corporations to gather data for the “Reputation” indicator. “Student Awards” is “the five-year tally of the number of students, per 1,000, who have won national awards”. Similarly, “Faculty Awards” is “The five-year tally of the number of full-time professors, per 1,000, who have won national awards”.
| Table 1: Maclean’s University Ranking (2006): Categories, Indicators, and Weightings | ||||||
| Ranking Category | Med/Doc& Comp. | Undergrad | Indicator | Med/Doc | Comp. | Underg. |
| Student Body | 23% | 22% | Ave. high school grade | 11% | 11% | 11% |
| Proportion with 75%+ | 2% | 2% | 2% | |||
| Out-of-province freshmen | 1.50% | 1.50% | 1.50% | |||
| International (undergrad) | 0.50% | 0.50% | 0.50% | |||
| International (grad) | 1% | 1% | – | |||
| Retention rate | 2% | 2% | 2% | |||
| Graduation rate | 2% | 2% | 2% | |||
| Student awards (5-year period) | 3% | 3% | 3% | |||
| Classes | 17% | 18% | Class Size (1st & 2nd year) | 7% | 7% | 7.50% |
| Class Size (3rd & 4th year) | 7% | 7% | 7.50% | |||
| Tenured professors | 3% | 3% | 3% | |||
| Faculty | 17% | 17% | PhDs | 3% | 3% | 3% |
| Awards | 3% | 3% | 3% | |||
| Grants awarded per faculty | 11% | 11% | 11% | |||
| Finance | 12% | 12% | Expenditure per student | 3.30% | 3.30% | 3.30% |
| Students services | 4.30% | 4.30% | 4.30% | |||
| Scholarships & bursaries | 4.30% | 4.30% | 4.30% | |||
| Library | 12% | 12% | Volumes per student | 3% | 4% | 4% |
| Total holdings | 1% | – | – | |||
| Percentage operating budget on library services | 4% | 4% | 4% | |||
| Percentage on updating collection | 4% | 4% | 4% | |||
| Reputation | 19% | 19% | Alumni support | 3% | 3% | 3% |
| Survey | 16% | 16% | 16% | |||
Source: Maclean’s (2006)
Results
| 2005 Overall Rankings Chart: Primarily Undergraduate Ranking | ||
| Ranking | University | Last year |
| 1 | St. Francis Xavier | 1 |
| 2 | Mount Allison | 2 |
| 3 | Acadia | 3 |
| 4 | UNBC | 7 |
| 5 | Bishop’s | 4 |
| 6 | St. Thomas | 10 |
| 7 | Saint Mary’s | 9 |
| 8 | UPEI | 8 |
| 8 | Trent | 6 |
| 10 | Wilfrid Laurier | 5 |
| 11 | Winnipeg | 11 |
| 12 | Mount Saint Vincent | 15 |
| 13 | Lethbridge | 12 |
| 14 | Brock | 13 |
| 15 | Moncton | 17 |
| 16 | Brandon | 14 |
| 16 | Lakehead | 17 |
| 18 | Ryerson | 16 |
| 19 | Laurentian | 19 |
| 20 | Cape Breton | 21 |
| 21 | Nipissing | 20 |
Source: Maclean’s (2005)
| 2005 Overall Rankings Chart: Comprehensive Ranking | ||
| Ranking | University | Last year |
| 1 | Waterloo | 1 |
| 2 | Victoria | 3 |
| 3 | Guelph | 2 |
| 3 | Simon Fraser | 4 |
| 5 | Memorial | 5 |
| 6 | Regina | 6 |
| 7 | New Brunswick | 7 |
| 8 | Carleton | 9 |
| 8 | Concorida | 9 |
| 10 | York | 8 |
| 11 | Windsor | 11 |
Source: Maclean’s (2005)
| 2005 Overall Rankings Chart: Medical Doctoral Ranking | ||
| Ranking | University | Last year |
| 1 | McGill | 2 |
| 1 | Toronto | 1 |
| 3 | Western | 3 |
| 4 | UBC | 4 |
| 5 | Queen’s | 5 |
| 6 | Alberta | 6 |
| 7 | Montréal | 7 |
| 8 | UPEI | 8 |
| 9 | Sherbrooke | 8 |
| 10 | Saskatchewan | 10 |
| 11 | McMaster | 8 |
| 12 | Ottawa | 12 |
| 13 | Dalhouise | 13 |
| 14 | Calgary | 14 |
| 15 | Manitoba | 15 |
Source: Maclean’s (2005)
RE$EARCH Infosource Inc. Top Research Universities List
Released each fall since 2001 by RE$EARCH Infosource Inc., Canada’s Top 50 Research Universities List ranks universities according to their total sponsored research income and research intensity, using data from Statistics Canada and from its own database on research and development at Canadian universities.
Methodology
The Research Universities List measures both financial input and research output indicators to arrive at an overall score for each university. The input category includes three indicators: total sponsored research income, faculty research intensity and graduate research intensity. Output is measured by publication intensity.
For each indicator universities are assigned points on a sliding scale from 100 to 2 according to how they measure up against their peers. Together the input and output categories are worth 50 points, and the three input indicators are weighted equally (16.67 points).
Financial Input Indicators
- Total Sponsored Research Income is measured according to the university’s fiscal reporting from the year previous.
- Faculty Research Intensity is defined as total research income per full-time faculty member. Fiscal data from the year previous and faculty information from the academic year previous are used to measure these indicators.
- Graduate Student Research Intensity is defined as the total research income per full-time graduate student. Data from the previous fiscal year and the academic year three years prior are used to measure these indicators.
Research Output
Publication Intensity is measured according to data taken from the Observatoire des Sciences et des Technologies Canadian Bibliometric database which contains data from the SCI, SSCI and AHCI databases and indexes. Faculty data is taken from Statistics Canada. The indicator is defined as the total number of publications per full-time faculty in 8,000 international journals across a spectrum of disciplines.
Results are available from: www.researchinfosource.com/top50.shtml