All Posts Tagged With: "macleans"

Mom, dad, big brother and sister—everyone was scrimping to keep Jessica Holman in university. The Maclean’s $20,000 scholarship changed all that.

Jessica Holman almost didn’t apply to university. Once accepted, she almost didn’t go. Even after a successful first semester of social work at Carleton University, she often felt she should be working instead of studying. The thing constantly nagging at her? Money.

That’s why Holman started crying when a woman from Maclean’s told her that she’d won the $20,000 scholarship contest, which was part of our 20th Rankings Issue celebration. She was chosen at random from more than 27,000 entries. “Maclean’s didn’t know how badly my family needs the money, so it’s kind of astonishing that we were the ones who won,” says Holman. “Now we don’t have to worry about whether or not I can go back to school next year.”

When she says “we,” she means her entire family back in Oakville, Ont. Her mom, dad—even her older brother and sister—are all scrimping and saving to help her pay for school. Her experience is a good reminder of how much many Canadian families sacrifice to send their kids to university. All in, it now costs roughly $80,000 for a four-year undergraduate degree, according to TD Economics. For many families, it’s a struggle to put even one child through school.

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Send us your writing, photos and videos and show us that you can.

Our site is looking to expand its roster of regular bloggers. You could be a high school student, university student, college student, graduate student or faculty member. This is your chance to share your experiences, ideas, passions and pet peeves on higher education with a national and international audience. We’re looking for traditional bloggers — i.e. people who communicate through the written word — and also video bloggers, photo bloggers and cartoonists. Or bloggers who combine some or all of the above. Having skills across multiple platforms, and video in particular, would be a definite asset.

To apply, please send us:

1. Your name, email address, and other basic contact details.

2. A short bio or c.v: Where are/were you at school? What are/were you studying? Or if you’re a high school student, where/what do you hope to study? And so on. Also send us a few photos

3. Samples of your writing: This is the most important part. These samples don’t necessarily have to be published work. Articles, blog posts, tweets, emails, notes passed in class: whatever. Just show us that you can think and write, and do both simultaneously.

3(b) Samples of your videography/photography/cartoons/etc: If you’re a post-literary type, and you’d like to do a primarily multimedia blog, send us a few media samples. Again, we don’t care if your work has been published/broadcast in the corporate or campus MSM. All that matters is the quality of the work, which will speak for itself.

4. A plan. Not a plan for the rest of your life. A plan for the blog. What do you want to do with the blog? What sorts of topics do you want to cover? Some people are hard core reporters; some are deeply personal chroniclers. Both approaches, and all choices in between, are open. Just let us know what you have in mind. The one stipulation is that the blog be focused on higher education.

Send all applications by October 4  to Maclean’s On Campus editor Carson Jerema at carsonjerema@gmail.com

Students tell what they really think about their university, from the quality of their profs to whether they feel they get the runaround.

Here you will find additional results from the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC).  The CUSC survey, which was commissioned by the universities, asks more than 100 questions about specific aspects of the undergraduate experience—inside the classroom and beyond—designed to provide universities with data to help them assess programs and services.

Each year, the survey targets one of three student populations: first-year students, graduating students and all undergrads. In 2009, 34 campuses took part, administering an online questionnaire to a random sample of approximately 1,000 graduating students at each university. Institutions with fewer than 1,000 graduating students surveyed them all. In total, more than 12,000 students took part for an overall response rate of 45 per cent.

Each chart lists the universities in descending order of achievement. Responses are ordered according to the percentage of survey participants who chose the highest level of satisfaction (e.g., “very satisfied”).

Complete 2010 University Student Survey results available here.

For past year’s results, see here

Which universities get top marks? 90,000 students have their say

Almost every day for the past few years, Meg Martin has spent three hours on public transit, commuting to and from the University of Calgary. She looks forward to Wednesdays, when her first class doesn’t start until 11 a.m. and she can sleep in. Most other days, the fourth-year political science and English major is on campus by 9 a.m., and because she’s involved in student politics, she often stays late into the night. “The hardest part about being a commuter is the exhaustion,” says Martin. But early in her university career, she decided to get involved in student politics, in part to make new friends, have a place to rest and study between classes, and so that she could avoid feeling like an anonymous number and instead become “a member of some type of community.” Right now, she’s gearing up for student elections, where she’s running for vice-president, academic.

Want to read more? Full student survey results are available here.

Click here to go to the web-exclusive student surveys.

In some ways, Martin is the typical undergraduate: she’s 21, attends an urban university with a student body that is the size of a small city and lives at home with her parents. However, Martin is also deeply involved in campus activities—and that sets her apart from many students, at Calgary and elsewhere. She demonstrates some of the attributes of what the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) calls an “engaged student.”

Research has shown that various different forms of engagement—from Martin’s high level of extracurricular contact with peers to curricular extras such as the opportunity to work closely with professors—are likely to lead to more learning, and greater student success. In an effort to raise the level of student engagement at Calgary, officials hired Martin and three other students to help conduct surveys, focus groups and interviews of staff, students and administrators. “This is exciting, because it’ll give me the opportunity to get my hands dirty and connect with stakeholders at this university,” says Martin.

On the following pages, we present the NSSE results from 53 Canadian institutions. NSSE, a student survey that seeks to indirectly measure educational quality, has become an essential analytical tool used by most Canadian universities. The survey pinpoints what students are doing while they are in school and on campus; NSSE then generates benchmark results that show how well those activities and behaviours line up with what research shows are educational best-practices that are likely to lead to more and deeper learning. The higher a school’s scores on the five benchmarks—featured on the accompanying pages—the better the chance, according to NSSE, that its students are learning and getting the most out of their university experience.

The NSSE was developed a decade ago by a group of American education professors, in part as an alternative to university rankings such as those published by U.S. News & World Report (and Maclean’s). NSSE’s creators believed that a student survey of undergraduate quality might be able to provide universities, students and the wider public with essential information about each university. “An extensive research literature relates particular classroom activities and specific faculty and peer practices to high-quality undergraduate student outcomes,” wrote NSSE’s creators. The survey aimed to measure and promote the use of those best practices.

Students tell what they really think about their university, from the size of their classes to the quality of their profs.

Heres you will find additional results from the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC).  The CUSC survey, which was commissioned by the universities, asks more than 100 questions about specific aspects of the undergraduate experience—inside the classroom and beyond—designed to provide universities with data to help them assess programs and services.

In 2008, 31 institutions took part, including two universities—UBC and the University of New Brunswick—that surveyed multiple campuses. Surveys were sent to a random sample of approximately 1,000 undergraduates in all years at each university. Institutions with fewer than 1,000 undergrads surveyed the entire cohort. Nearly 12,000 students responded.

In each chart, universities are listed in descending order. Order was determined by the percentage of students who chose the highest level of satisfaction of agreement when responding, for example, “excellent.”

Past year’s surveys are available here.
Want more? Full student survey results are available here.

A primer for navigating your college and university choices

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.

Use Maclean’s exclusive data to build your own, customized university ranking

This tool offers you the ability to select up to seven performance indicators(measures of university quality)drawn from the most recent edition of the Maclean’s University Rankings, and then weight them according to your own preferences.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE TOOL

How it works:
Select (up to seven at a time) indicators. Then click NEXT.

You need to assign a weight to each indicator so that the total will add up to 100 per cent. For example, you could decide that the following indicators are most important to you:

• Student awards: 10 per cent
• Library acquisitions: 25 per cent
• Student/faculty ratio: 10 per cent
• Student services: 20 per cent
• Awards per full-time faculty: 10 per cent
• Scholarships & bursaries: 20 per cent
• Reputational survey: 5 per cent

Once your total adds up to 100 per cent, click NEXT.

Select the Canadian universities you wish to compare. You can choose all universities, or select by region, such as universities in the West, Ontario, Quebec or the Atlantic region. Or you can create your own list of up to 49 individual institutions. Click NEXT.

Our tool will compute and compare your custom criteria, or indicators, across all of the schools you selected. Voila! Your own personalized ranking of Canadian universities.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE TOOL

CLICK HERE TO GO TO A DESCRIPTION OF THE INDICATORS

Note: Ranking for the Personalized University Ranking Tool is not calculated in the same way as the annual Maclean’s university rankings. Though the two use common data, the rankings use a statistical percentile method and are three separate rankings, one for each of the three categories of universities: Primarily Undergraduate, Comprehensive and Medical-Doctoral. As such, results obtained from this online tool may not agree with the Maclean’s annual rankings, even if the same set of weights are applied to the indicators.

Which universities get top marks? 87,000 students have their say

It’s mid-January, a couple of weeks after the Christmas break, and Mark Woodcroft, a fourth-year biochemistry major at Trent University, is hanging out in the lab with professor Steven Rafferty, his research supervisor and chair of Trent’s chemistry department. Woodcroft is doing what many Canadian undergraduates never get a chance to do: an independent research project under faculty supervision.

Want to read more? Full student survey results are available here.

Click here to go to the web-exclusive student surveys.

So, a reporter asks, what’s your research project about? Woodcroft casts a sly smile at his prof and then launches deadpan into an explanation of the “bioaccumulation of perfluorinated carboxylic acids.” His audience predictably befuddled, Woodcroft stops mid-sentence. He and Rafferty chuckle in unison. It sounds like a well-rehearsed routine. Not something many 22-year-olds get to cook up with a professor.

“In upper-year courses, the class size is small enough for a professor to know each student by name,” says Woodcroft. “I also know everyone in my program by name. I doubt many students at a larger school can say that.”

Personal contact with faculty members, a sense of community among undergrads and classes that push students to their intellectual limits—these are all things that many undergraduate students desire. Research suggests that these also promote learning; in the language of the National Survey of Student Engagement, these and other aspects of student engagement are “correlates of quality.” And according to the NSSE Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice results appearing on the following pages, undergraduate educational quality at Canadian universities—with only a few exceptions—is below that of American universities.

Below you will also find results from the Canadian Undergraduate Survey Consortium, or CUSC, a Canada-only survey that is much more tilted toward assessing student satisfaction. In 2007, CUSC surveyed first-year students at 32 universities. You can find results for seven additional CUSC student satisfaction questions on our website, at www.macleans.ca/oncampus.

While undergraduate student satisfaction remains relatively high at Canadian institutions, the NSSE benchmark results suggest a different story: satisfied or not, many Canadian university campuses are not as engaging and may not be offering as good an educational experience as their American peers. And the problem is particularly pronounced at Canada’s large research universities—the schools educating the overwhelming majority of Canadian undergrads.

The American-based NSSE survey is a tool widely used by universities to analyze, benchmark and improve their institutional performance. Since 1999, the American-based NSSE (pronounced “Nessie”) has been conducting its survey on a growing number of campuses, and calculating its Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice for each participating school. Beginning in 2004, a growing number of Canadian universities began to take part in NSSE. The biggest push came from Bob Rae’s 2005 review of post-secondary education in Ontario. Rae called on the province to establish measures for evaluating quality and publicly reporting on system performance. In his review, Rae asked, “How are we doing? How are others doing? Is there a jurisdiction that does it better?” His conclusion: “We simply don’t know enough about how we are doing or how others are doing.” To this end, Rae recommended that all Ontario universities participate in NSSE. All Ontario universities have done so over the past two years, and most universities in the rest of the country have joined them. Several of the 47 universities that Maclean’s surveys in its annual rankings of Canadian universities have never participated in NSSE; they include Bishop’s University, Cape Breton University, St. Francis Xavier University, Memorial University, Université de Moncton and Université de Sherbrooke.

Law has always been among the most competitive of professional schools. So how do Canada’s law schools compare?

For a complete explanation of the methodology behind the rankings, CLICK HERE

Welcome to our first annual ranking of Canadian law schools. The annual Maclean’s university rankings, published each November, have long offered a broad evaluation of the quality of undergraduate education at each university. But this marks the first time that we are ranking a specific program within the university.

Law has long been one of the most competitive of professional schools. Above-average undergraduate marks are generally a must, with some schools being so competitive that they only extend offers to the most outstanding students.

Our law ranking is not, however, a ranking of which schools are the hardest to get into. It is, instead, about measuring the quality of the output of each school.

The methodology behind the Maclean’s law school ranking was created by professor Brian Leiter, the Hines H. Baker and Thelma Kelly Baker chair at the University of Texas at Austin Law School. He is also a professor of philosophy, as well as the director of U Texas’s law and philosophy program.

Leiter may also be America’s most prominent critic of the best-known journalistic ranking of law schools: the annual law school rankings from U.S. News and World Report. Leiter’s criticisms have been directed at the specifics of the U.S. News methodology, which is, among other things, based in part on data provided by schools, contains some data that is open to manipulation, and other data that, even if accurate, may not be measuring anything particularly relevant. On one of his blogs — www.leiterrankings.com — he has for many years compiled and published alternative ways of measuring law school quality. His numbers are often looked to by those in American academe who seek to measure roughly where their schools stand.

We turned to Leiter to help us build a relevant and unbiased assessment of Canadian law schools.

The Maclean’s law school ranking contains only four elements, all drawn from publicly available data. Fifty per cent of the ranking weight is devoted to student and graduate quality; the other 50 per cent is composed of a measure of faculty quality.

To calculate the “Faculty Journal Citations” measure, weighted at 50 per cent of the ranking, we counted the number of tenure and tenure-track faculty at each law school, excluding adjunct faculty, emeritus professors and the like. We then researched each professor’s citation count in Quicklaw’s database of 33 Canadian legal journals. We added up total citations for each school, and then divided by the number of professors at each school.(For more on methodology, go to macleans.ca/oncampus and click on “Rankings.”)

For the “Elite Firm Hiring” measure, worth 25 per cent, we relied on the Lexpert list of the leading Canadian law firms, and Vault’s list of leading New York firms. On each firm’s website, we counted the number of associates from each school. We divided each school’s total by the size of each school’s first-year class, as provided by the website of the Law School Admission Council. The “National Reach” measure, worth 15 per cent, involved using information gathered for “Elite Firm Hiring,” and calculating how many of each school’s graduates had been hired by leading firms other than the three firms that hired the most graduates from that school. This is a rough measure of the extent to which leading firms outside of a school’s region hire its graduates. “A degree that gets you hired from Vancouver to Montreal is a degree that many students may prefer to have,” says Leiter. “That’s what we’re trying to measure here.”

The “Supreme Court Clerkship” measure is worth 10 per cent. We looked at Supreme Court clerks hired over the past six years, and counted the number from each school. Supreme Court clerkships are one-year positions, awarded to the country’s top students, as chosen by the judges. Our source for the list of clerks was Osgoode Hall’s The Court website,(www.thecourt.ca/clerks-of-the-supreme-court).

Is this ranking useful for potential students? “Excellence of the faculty and professional opportunities afforded by an education must surely be two traditional and central markers of academic excellence in law school or any professional school,” says Leiter. “Schools themselves engage in constant self-representations on both counts, and professionals and students tend to have inchoate impressions of their own. Quantitative and systematic study of how schools actually fare along these dimensions should prove a useful corrective to advertising puffery and dated or inaccurate anecdotes.”

A Q&A with Professor Brian Leiter

To create its first annual law ranking, Maclean’s turned to Brian Leiter, a professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin. Leiter is probably the most prominent and long-standing critic of the U.S. News and World Report rankings of U.S. law schools, and has long offered alternative, and more useful and accurate ways, of assessing law school performance.(For more on Leiter’s performance measures for U.S. law schools, see www.leiterrankings.com. For the full run down of all of Leiter’s blog, on a variety of legal topics, visit http://www.naymz.com/search/brian/leiter/793046).

This past spring, I approached Leiter, to ask him to work with us to create an assessment of Canadian law schools. The methodology that was ultimately adopted is simple, transparent and relies entirely on public data. It contains four measures, with a 50% weighting for Student/Graduate quality and a 50% weighting for Faculty quality:

• Faculty Quality(weighted at 50%), measures how often faculty members at each school are cited by other academics in 33 Canadian legal journals found in the Quicklaw journals database. Maclean’s did a citation search for each faculty member, with faculty defined as professors holding titles such as professor, full professor, associate professor and assistant professor, and excluding emeritus professors, adjunct faculty, law librarians, administrators who are not professors, and the like. The list of faculty was drawn from each law school’s website in August, 2007.

• Elite Firm Hiring(worth 25%)uses the Lexpert list of leading Canadian law firms as its basis. Because a small number of highly qualified Canadian law graduates also move to the US, we also counted hires by the five leading New York law firms, as measured by Vault. For a list of firms studied, CLICK HERE Maclean’s examined the website of each of these leading law firms, and counted the number of associates from each law school at each firm.(We counted only first law degrees, and for Ottawa we reached one grand total, rather than dividing its graduates up as Ottawa-Civil and Ottawa-Common). Young lawyers start out as associates and are usually either partners(or no longer at the firm)in seven to 10 years, so this measure captures hiring from the mid- to late-1990s to the present. To scale these figures to school size, the totals for each school were then divided by the size of the 2006 first-year class at each school. First year class-size numbers were taken from the Law School Admission Council website. Of 2103 associates found at the firms on the Lexpert and Vault lists, 47 had their first law degree from a non-Canadian law school, and 42 had no biographical information.

• National Reach(worth 15%): This measure looks at how widely spread are the graduates from each school. The idea is to get a sense of whether a law school is able to place its grads at leading firms beyond its region and beyond a small network of firms. The elite firm hiring count from the previous metric was examined to determine what percentage of a school’s graduates are at elite firms other than the three elite firms that have the most associates from that school. If School X has 100 associates at elite firms, and 45 associates at its top three firms, it would have a “reach quotient” of 55/100 = 0.55.

• Supreme Court hiring(worth 10%): Clerks are hired by the Supreme Court for a term that is usually one year; the clerks are selected by the judges and are generally chosen from the country’s top graduating students. We measured clerkship hiring over the past six years. Starting with the list of law clerks on Osgoode Hall’s The Court blog, at http://www.thecourt.ca/clerks-of-the-supreme-court, we researched which law school each clerk attended for their first degree. We were able to find first-degree information for 142 out of 162 clerks. For the University of Ottawa, we did separate calculations for each branch of the law school(common and civil). We tallied the number of clerks from each program, added the number of clerks with both civil and common law degrees from Ottawa to each of those tallies, then divided by the number of first year students in each respective law stream at U Ottawa. There were 20 clerks from Ottawa common law, two from Ottawa civil law, and three with degrees from both.

Just prior to publication, I asked Professor Brian Leiter to answer some questions about the rankings.