Choose your future

Each year, a new crop of young Canadians tries to figure out how to write the next chapter of their lives. And each year, tens of thousands of them find the answer in higher education. This issue, now in its 18th year and containing our largest universities package ever, is about helping you to make the most informed higher education choice by opening up an entire country’s worth of educational possibilities. On this website, you will find advice on how to pay for school and how to spend your time wisely once you are there. There’s news on the latest trends in higher education, from a new university that aims to completely redefine undergraduate education, to a province where most universities are promising four years’ worth of scholarship support to even average students, but with fine print that causes the overwhelming majority to see only a fraction of the money.

You’ll hear from students who were recently undergrads, talking about how they did it—and how they might do it differently if given another chance. You’ll be presented with the results of the nation’s most extensive surveys of university students; surveys conducted amongst tens of thousands of students by the universities themselves. These student surveys reveal the level of satisfaction (and dissatisfaction) at each university, as well as providing objective, university-by-university assessments of educational quality. And this issue of course also contains Maclean’s annual university rankings.

But before you dive in, you’ll need a road map. The Canadian higher education system can be difficult to understand and navigate because it offers so many choices, in both courses of study and types of institutions. In higher education, Canada offers two basic streams: university and college. Colleges mostly provide practical education in fields such as the trades, and the programs of study are generally two years or shorter. Universities mostly concentrate on offering four-year degrees in the arts and sciences; they’re also where you’ll go to school if you want to become a professional, such as a doctor, lawyer, engineer, accountant or professor.

There are bright lines between the two types of institutions—but there’s also an increasing amount of common ground. To take one example, you can study business at college or university. Many colleges, which used to focus exclusively on short training courses and two-year diplomas, are now offering some four-year bachelor’s degrees. College and university are distinct, but they’re also partially overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. The two have a long history of partnership—in Western Canada in particular, many students begin the first year or two of their university degree at a local college and complete it at a university, as part of a transfer program. Some universities and colleges share programs and a few even share campuses, such as the University of Guelph-Humber, where students simultaneously earn a diploma from Humber College and a degree from the University of Guelph.