All Posts Tagged With: "nsse"
Canadian university considers radical change
Find out why some students are opposed
Algoma University photo by Ontario MTCU
Back in first year, I remember realizing that the hardest part of university isn’t the lab reports, the chemistry midterms, or the 1000-word essays.
It’s when they’re all due within three days of each other. Before you can even begin learning the material, you must learn how to juggle five course’s worth material that always comes due at once.
That problem could be eliminated for future students at tiny Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, which is debating switching to a block plan where students would be taught one course at a time, rather than five at once.
The block plan looks like this. A semester’s worth of calculus is compressed into three and a half weeks, with classes taking three or four hours each day, followed by four or five hours of homework. After a few weeks, there’s an exam. Then students move directly to the next course.
Continue reading Canadian university considers radical change
Which students work hardest?
Business? Engineering? Arts? You may be surprised.
Courtesy of NSSE. Click to enlarge.
Engineering students have been known to curse friends in other majors. That’s because they often spend hours sitting in their residence rooms sweating over near impossible differential equations while their non-engineering roommates leisurely read a couple chapters and then head out to party.
Then again, ask an arts major how hard they’re working and they’ll start rattling off the number of essays they have due.
But finally, it’s settled. Engineering students study more. The new release of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) shows that North American Engineering students spend 19 hours per week, on average, preparing for class. Arts, humanities and biology majors study 17 hours per week. Social science and business students study only 14 hours.
But don’t assume all non-engineers are slacking. Business students study the least, but they aren’t socializing any more. Instead, they work seven hours more per week at paying jobs. In fact, if you add jobs and study together, business students work the most—30 hours per week. Social sciences students work the least overall (27 hours). Engineering students are in the middle (28 hours).
NSSE, considered the gold standard of student surveys, involved polling of senior year students at 683 U.S. and 68 Canadian institutions in 2011. It had a response rate of 33 per cent.
2011 Student Surveys: Complete results
Students tell universities how the system is working. It’s all about class time.
Teaching often comes second at universities—quite literally. Professors are expected to spend only 40 per cent of their time in the classroom, consulting with students, and marking their work. The rest is spent on research and other duties. The research-intensive university produces world-class discoveries to be sure, but it also produces grumbling undergraduates. The results of this year’s student satisfaction surveys couldn’t show this more clearly. The research-intensive universities for the most part do not perform as well on these student surveys.
Schools that dare to focus on teaching have risen to the top of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Professors at teaching-focused universities like Quest, Trinity Western and King’s at Western are free to spend a majority of their time engaging with students in the classroom, the office or beyond. Considering the fact that a recent study from the University of Alberta found that the average professor is already working 56 hours per week, it’s difficult to expect them to do more. The only way they can spend more time with students is to de-emphasize research. And not all researchers make good teachers. Teaching-focused schools focus on pedagogy in the job interview, says David Sylvester, principal of King’s at Western. It’s certainly paying off for his school. Six in 10 senior-year students say they would definitely go back to King’s if they were allowed to start over, the NSSE survey found. That’s compared to only 45 per cent of students overall, and only 21 per cent of senior-year students from the University of Ottawa.
The student’s Quest
From dirt and dreams to student favourite: what’s different about Quest University is pretty much everything
When Celeta Cook of Deseronto, Ont., applied five years ago as a 17-year-old to Quest University, the hilltop site in the coastal mountain community of Squamish, B.C., was little more than dirt and dreams. “I did my preview day in a hard hat and a reflective vest,” says Cook, now part of Quest’s first grad class this April 30. The library will be finished, she was promised, “it just hasn’t been built yet.” Far from being put off, she was excited. “All right,” she said, “I’ll see you guys in September.” She was one of 73 students in 2007. There are now about 300, as it builds toward its capacity of 650—still smaller than most of the high schools the students came from.
For Cook, it was a good fit. Quest, a private, not-for-profit undergraduate liberal arts and sciences university, is not for the faint of heart. Its promotional literature welcomes “iconoclasts, convention-challengers, pioneers, risktakers, edge seekers, creators . . . ” The same criteria apply to its faculty, and certainly its outgoing president, David J. Helfand, who divides his time between two coasts. He’s a teacher and administrator at Quest, and he chairs the astronomy department at New York’s Ivy League Columbia University.
2010 Student Surveys: Complete results
In two major surveys, students get the chance to grade their own universities.
There are many ways by which a university can measure its performance, including asking those on the receiving end of an education—the students—what they think. In recent years, a growing number of universities have been doing exactly that. The following pages contain results from two major student surveys: the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Canadian University Survey Consortium—NSSE and CUSC for short. Between them, these surveys examine how involved students are in various academic and extracurricular activities, how satisfied they are with their university and its faculty, and how connected they feel to their school.
Want to know what universities are doing to improve the student experience? Click here.
The findings show that while students are generally happy with their university education, there are key areas of discontent. In particular, a significant number of students feel they don’t fit in at their university, more often in the larger schools than the smaller ones.
Commissioned by the universities, the surveys ask more than 150 questions about the undergraduate experience—inside the classroom and beyond. The answers help each university assess the quality of its programs and services, which in turn can aid in the design and implementation of strategies to improve areas as indicated.
Recognizing that this data can also be useful for prospective students trying to decide which university is right for them, Maclean’s has been publishing CUSC and NSSE results each year since 2006. They provide direct feedback from students on the quality of their education and their general level of satisfaction.
The U.S.-based NSSE began in 1999 and is distributed to first- and senior-year students. Administered by the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, NSSE is not primarily a student satisfaction survey. Rather, it is a study of best educational practices and an assessment of the degree to which each university follows those practices. The survey pinpoints what students are doing while they are in school and on campus.
Research has shown that various forms of engagement are likely to lead to more learning and greater student success. And this link exists not only in the more obvious areas of academic endeavour, such as the number of books read and papers written, but also in curricular extras such as conducting research with a faculty member, community service, internships and studying abroad, as well as in extracurricular involvement with other students.
Applying knowledge
A student survey helps universities target areas for improvement.
Anne Celine Hansen, a fourth-year bachelor of management student at the University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus, used to find herself stuck between classes killing time. “I wouldn’t really know what to do with myself,” she says. Hansen, who lives about a 20-minute walk from campus, could study at the library or sit in the cafeteria, but it was hard to connect with other people. Like many students living off-campus, she felt disconnected from the pulse of her university. “Students would take the bus up to campus, go to class and then take the bus back home,” says Hansen.
In 2006, UBC started administering the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), a U.S.-based survey that indirectly measures educational quality by analyzing what students do with their time on campus. NSSE measures a university’s performance based on five key benchmarks—including student-faculty interaction, level of academic challenge and supportive campus environment—providing data for comparison across time and between institutions. Research has shown that higher levels of engagement can lead to greater student success. UBC’s results pointed to the disengagement that Hansen and others at Okanagan were feeling, so in 2008, the school decided to correct the problem. “We wanted to make sure that our commuter students had exactly the same campus life experience as the residence students, the same level of TLC,” says Ian Cull, associate vice-president of students at the Okanagan campus.
The school set up what it calls “collegia”—on-campus lounges providing space for commuter students to sit and do homework, talk, or just watch TV. They’re staffed by senior students, called collegia assistants, who answer questions, provide information about the university and set up social events. Hansen has been working as a collegia assistant since the program started. Students “are always coming in and talking to people, meeting people,” she says. “It becomes a big group.”
The issue of student engagement is becoming increasingly important for universities, especially since NSSE arrived at 11 Canadian schools in 2004. The survey has now been conducted at 64 institutions across Canada, with 11 more universities and one college set to participate for the first time this year. And as the years of data accumulate, schools are using the insight NSSE provides to create programs tailored to improving the quality of their students’ education.
Administrators at the University of New Brunswick had little cash to spend on new programs, but they didn’t want to waste their NSSE data. So Tony Secco, UNB’s vice-president, academic, had the information broken down by faculty and distributed to the deans. Deciding to concentrate primarily on one benchmark—student-faculty interaction—they pooled ideas and came up with several low-cost ways to better connect professors with their pupils. The administration hosted student-faculty mixers, held faculty workshops on student engagement, asked professors to spend more time mentoring after class, and converted unused space on campus into common and student services rooms where faculty and students can meet. While there are no hard data yet on how well the initiatives are working, the response from students and teachers has been positive. “Engagement in any exercise is very strongly linked to the fulfillment that is sensed by the individual,” says Secco. For his part, UNB president Eddy Campbell observes: “NSSE is a good instrument for measuring that engagement. And it allows us a good look at the places where we need to do better.”
But NSSE isn’t just supposed to be used internally. Its results are meant to be shared across schools, and are most effective when broken down into faculties and student groups. Unfortunately, this isn’t an easy process. “There’s no formal mechanism for sharing information across institutions,” says Chris Conway, principal investigator for the NSSE intervention project—a group, funded by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, that examines NSSE’s effectiveness. He says Canada needs “a more systematic data sharing and analysis exercise” that breaks down information by school and then by faculty, making cross-institutional comparisons easy. Conway and a committee of educators from around the country are working to create a national data-sharing initiative that will do exactly that. So far, 44 universities have signed on to the project, and Conway is hoping to release preliminary results within four months.
Conway is cautious, however, not to draw conclusions prematurely, noting that although NSSE has built a good foundation of knowledge in Canada, the programs it’s helped to create are still in their infancy, and universities won’t know how effective they are without a few more years of data. “I don’t think we’re at the point now where we can say a given type of experience gives you the best bang for your buck in terms of quality improvement,” he says.
Still, Jillian Kinzie, the NSSE institute’s associate director, is optimistic, pointing out that Canadian schools are continually improving their scores and bettering their educational programs. “The thing that impresses me the most is the commitment to action,” she says. “Digging in and really spending time thinking about what these results tell us about the quality of students’ educational experiences, that’s the most important part—converting the results into some sort of action to improve the educational experience.”
2010 University Student Surveys: web-exclusive charts
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.
University students grade their schools
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.
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.
2009 Student Surveys
Small schools excel, Canada lags behind the U.S. and the undergrad revolution
Below you will find the results from two major student surveys: the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Canadian University Survey Consortium (CUSC).
THE SURVEYS: WHAT THEY ARE AND HOW THEY WERE DONE
The NSSE and CUSC surveys, which were commissioned by the universities themselves, ask more than 150 questions about the undergraduate experience—inside the classroom and beyond. The answers help each university assess the quality of its programs and services. The surveys can also be used by the public to do the same.
The U.S.-based NSSE began in 1999 and is distributed to first- and senior-year students. NSSE is not primarily a student satisfaction survey, but is rather a study of best-educational practices—known as correlates of learning—and an assessment of the degree to which each university follows those best practices.
In 2004, 11 Canadian universities participated for the first time in NSSE, with more than 14,000 students completing the survey. Participation has grown considerably since then: more than 700 American universities took part in the 2008 NSSE; they were joined by 47 Canadian institutions, where 78,288 undergrads filled out the survey.
The NSSE results are headlined by the Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice, created by NSSE to compare performance across all universities—American and Canadian—in five key areas: Level of Academic Challenge, Student-Faculty Interaction, Active and Collaborative Learning, Enriching Educational Experience, and Supportive Campus Environment. Each school’s benchmark result was calculated by NSSE, based on student responses to a variety of questions. NSSE also asked two important student satisfaction questions; school-by-school results appear on the following pages.
CUSC was created in 1994; it is a Canada-only survey, and unlike NSSE, it is in large part about student satisfaction. 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 at each university. Institutions with fewer than 1,000 undergrads surveyed the entire cohort. Nearly 12,000 students responded.
For the results of seven CUSC satisfaction questions, read the web-exclusive charts.
2009 STUDENT SURVEYS: web-exclusive charts
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.
2008 Student Surveys
Which universities get top marks? 87,000 students have their say
Below you will find the results from two major student surveys: the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and the Canadian Undergraduate Survey Consortium (CUSC).
THE SURVEYS: WHAT THEY ARE AND HOW THEY WERE DONE
The NSSE and CUSC surveys, which were commissioned by the universities, ask more than 150 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.
The U.S.-based NSSE began in 1999 and is distributed to first- and senior-year students. NSSE is not primarily a student satisfaction survey, but is rather a study of best-educational practices, and an assessment of the degree to which each university follows those best practices.
In 2004, 11 Canadian universities participated for the first time in NSSE, with 14,267 students completing the survey. By 2006, that number had grown to approximately 60,000 students at 31 Canadian institutions. Seventeen universities or their affiliates participated in the 2007 NSSE, representing roughly 14,000 students—fewer than in 2006 because most institutions conduct the NSSE survey every two years.
The NSSE results are headlined by the Benchmarks of Effective Educational Practice, created by NSSE to compare performance across all universities—American and Canadian—in five key areas: Level of Academic Challenge, Student-Faculty Interaction, Active and Collaborative Learning, Enriching Educational Experience, and Supportive Campus Environment. Each school’s benchmark result was calculated by NSSE, based on student responses to a variety of questions. NSSE also asked two important student satisfaction questions; school-by-school results appear on the following pages.
CUSC was created in 1994; it is a Canada-only survey, and unlike NSSE, it is in large part a student satisfaction survey. In 2007, 32 universities took part, including two institutions—UBC and the University of New Brunswick—that surveyed multiple campuses. Surveys were sent to a random sample of approximately 1,000 first-year undergrads at each university. Institutions with fewer than 1,000 first-years surveyed the entire cohort. More than 12,700 students responded.
For the results of seven CUSC satisfaction questions, read the web-exclusive charts.
Choose your future
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.
The Maclean’s Personalized University Ranking Tool
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.
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 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.
2008 STUDENT SURVEYS: web-exclusive charts
Students tell what they really think about their university, from whether they got the classes they wanted to the quality of their profs.
You will find results from the web-exclusive charts here, from the Canadian Undergraduate 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. Launched in 1994, CUSC is coordinated through the University of Manitoba’s department of housing and student life. In 2007, 32 universities took part, including two institutions—UBC and the University of New Brunswick—that surveyed multiple campuses. Surveys were sent to a random sample of approximately 1,000 first-year undergrads at each university. Institutions with fewer than 1,000 first-years surveyed the entire cohort. More than 12,700 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 to read more? Full student survey results are available here.
University students grade their schools
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.
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.
You have so many options
But before you choose, think about who you are
You may be reading this, our 17th annual and largest-ever University Rankings issue, because you are thinking about going to university. Or maybe you are the parent of someone who is thinking about university. (Or maybe you are the parent of someone who you wish would unplug the iPod and start thinking about university.) Whatever the case, you are faced with a lot of options, so many choices in fact—so many universities, so many majors, so many programs, so many decisions—that you worry about making the right one.
You should take some relief in knowing that this is sort of like a multiple choice test, but where there is more than one right answer: more than one right university, more than one right course of study and more than one right destination. There are almost innumerable right answers. The challenge is figuring out which answers could be right for you.
Education can expose you to ideas and possibilities that will change your mind and your life, likely in unforeseen ways. A little learning can alter the most deeply held opinions, along with the best laid plans. I started my undergraduate degree at one university but decided to finish it at another; I intended to be a historian but ended up a journalist; I planned to go to graduate school but wound up accepting a job instead. None of the later choices was an attempt to fix a mistake; on the contrary, I’m glad I made all of those decisions. You too will get to change your mind and change your life. Multiple choice test, lots of right answers.
There is no institution or course of study that will guarantee something as concrete as success, or as ineffable as happiness. But your odds of both can be, on average, substantially increased by attending university. The happiness thing isn’t easy to quantify, but material success is: it will not surprise you to learn that the average Canadian with a university degree makes considerably more than a person with a college or trade-school diploma, who in turns is doing better than the average person with only a high-school education. In fact, the average Canadian with a university degree can expect to make about $1 million more over a lifetime than someone without. It’s been a pretty solid investment for the last couple of generations.
The above statistics are, however, an average for millions of Canadians of all ages. University is a place where you will be asked to look closer, to find out what complexity lies beneath the surface. So before you become a university student, let’s dig a bit deeper into some numbers about university grads.
According to the 2001 census, the average male whose highest level of education is a bachelor’s degree earned $56,810 in 2000. But that average number masks some very large differences in outcomes by areas of study. I asked Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies, to dig into the Statistics Canada data and give us a deeper look at who earns how much, based on what they studied at university. We focused on men, to make for more accurate comparisons across disciplines, and the 35- to 39-year-old age group, to look at people who are already well into their careers.
What we discovered is that some university courses of study deliver markedly above average incomes—and some do not.
In 2000, men aged 35 to 39 whose highest level of education was a bachelor’s degree in computer science and other applied mathematics made nearly $70,000 a year. Men in their late 30s with bachelor’s degrees in economics earned an average of nearly $72,000 a year; those with degrees in electrical and electronic engineering made nearly $73,000. (All figures have been rounded to the nearest thousand.) Those with degrees in business, commerce and management were making well over $70,000, too. Bachelor’s degrees in mining, metallurgical and petroleum engineering earned nearly $80,000, while those who studied actuarial science were pulling in just shy of $95,000. Many of those in the sciences also made out better than the average, with B.Sc.s in chemistry earning nearly $63,000 and B.Sc.s in physics making over $58,000.
Those earning the above-average incomes generally had degrees in applied fields: business, engineering, plus some sciences. The one constant seems to be a solid grasp of math.
On the other side of the balance were those whose incomes fell below the average. They included graduates in the arts, humanities and some sciences and social sciences. Late-30s men with a bachelor’s in biology made just over $52,000. Those with a degree in sociology earned $51,000. Psychology grads made $49,000; English language and literature earned $45,000. Those with degrees in philosophy earned $44,000, fine arts earned $42,000, anthropology pulled in $40,000 and grads with degrees in music made $38,000.
Maclean’s first-ever ranking of Canada’s law schools
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.”
PLUS – What it will take to get in
Median LSAT scores from each of Canada’s law schools
All common law schools, with the exception of Moncton, consider results from the standardized Law School Admission Test when assessing applicants. Here are the median LSAT scores for the fall 2006 incoming class.
The methodology behind the law school rankings
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.
WEB EXCLUSIVE Bonus law school rankings
Law schools ranked
These breakout charts explain the numbers behind the ranking, which is exclusively available in the September 24 issue of Maclean’s, found on newsstands now.
For a complete explanation of the methodology behind the rankings, CLICK HERE
Graduate quality
Maclean’s measured the number of associates at leading Canadian law firms—as determined by Lexpert—per each school’s first-year class, using numbers from the Law School Admission Council.
