Our 19th Annual Rankings

The ranking process begins in the spring when Maclean’s sends thousands of reputational surveys to university officials, high school principals and guidance counsellors, heads of organizations, CEOs and corporate recruiters across the country, asking for their views on quality and innovation at Canadian universities. During the course of the summer, Maclean’s collects information on dozens of student and faculty awards from 45 administering agencies.

The rankings are based on the most recent and publicly available data. Statistics Canada provides student and faculty numbers, as well as data for total research income and all five financial indicators—operating budget, spending on student services, scholarships and bursaries, library expenses and acquisitions. For the social sciences and humanities research grants indicator and the medical/science research grants indicator, our research team obtains data for fiscal 2008-2009 directly from the three major federal granting agencies: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). The Canadian Association of Research Libraries provides figures used for the library holdings indicators. Financial and library figures are for fiscal 2007-2008; student and faculty numbers are for 2007 and 2006, respectively.

Beginning on page 139 of our newsstand edition, you will find charts breaking out all the data for every performance measure used in the rankings—from funding for scholarships and bursaries to the number of awards won by students and faculty. On page 156, you will find display tables of additional data, such as entering grade averages and graduation rates—information that not all universities are willing to make public. Maclean’s obtains the figures in this section directly from universities or from university websites—whenever such data are available and comparable—as well as from Common University Data Ontario (CUDO), an initiative of the Council of Ontario Universities.

Maclean’s weights the rankings as follows:

STUDENTS/CLASSES (20 per cent of final score) Maclean’s collects data on the success of the student body at winning national academic awards (weighted 10 per cent) over the previous five years. The list covers 40 fellowship and prize programs, encompassing more than 17,000 individual awards from 2004 through 2008. The count includes such prestigious awards as the Rhodes scholarships and the Fulbright awards, as well as scholarships from professional associations and the three federal granting agencies. Each university’s total of student awards is divided by its number of full-time students, yielding a count of awards relative to each institution’s size.

To gauge students’ access to professors, Maclean’s also measures the number of full-time-equivalent students per full-time faculty member (10 per cent). This student/faculty ratio includes all students, graduate as well as undergraduate.