All Posts Tagged With: "Rankings"

For 20 years, we have been bringing together parents, presidents, professors and prospective students in a conversation about education

Going to university is like standing on the edge of your life—one of many edges, we later discover. It’s an optimistic moment, especially if you believe Oscar Wilde when he said that the basis of optimism is sheer terror. Students have to figure out not only where to go, but more importantly and subtly, where they belong—the “goodness of fit,” as one of our experts described it. We parents have to stand aside (okay, not too far aside) and let them choose, negotiating our own desires and fears alongside theirs. We hand them off to their professors, who take on the daunting task of literally educating our darlings—roomfuls of ambitious, cocky, nerve-wracked kids—to become the very best and smartest versions of themselves. Meanwhile, we all look to the leaders of our universities, presidents from the University of Victoria to the University of Prince Edward Island, to navigate and define what it means to be an institution of higher learning in Canada in 2010. And while we’re on it, just what is the purpose of a university education today—to expand your mind? Get a job? All in all, it’s a lot to think about.

Which is where Maclean’s comes in. For 20 years, we have been bringing together parents, presidents, professors and prospective students in a conversation about education. This, the 20th anniversary issue of our university rankings, is our biggest and most ambitious edition ever. Our goal is not just to be the most valuable resource in the country—and we are that—but also to personalize the university decision by making it as easy as possible; everything you need to make up your mind is right here in one place. It’s not a cheap decision, either: a four-year degree in Canada now costs about $60,000. On the other hand, university graduates earn an average of 75 per cent more over their lifetime than non-graduates, and have a substantially higher employment rate. Not bad, as investments go.

The same might be said of the decision 20 years ago to launch Maclean’s first-ever rankings issue. “At the time, universities were the most closed, secretive public institutions in the country,” says former Maclean’s editor Kevin Doyle, who created the university rankings. “There was so little information available, parents and students had no idea how to go about selecting a university.

The first rankings, published in October 1991, stirred a public debate and began a process that had a revolutionary impact on the schools themselves, says Doyle, who recently retired as executive director of communications and public affairs at the University of Windsor. “Universities have changed because of this. They’ve come to treat students as clients to be sought after and cultivated.”

Sen. Linda Frum agrees. The subject of this week’s interview and the author of her own guide to universities in 1987, she recalls her university experience. “I attended McGill University in the early ’80s, a period when a hostile separatist government was starving the institution of funds. Back then, the suggestion that the school would one day be rescued by a $750-million fundraising campaign financed by Anglo alumni would have sounded fantastical. The idea of a McGill principal as governor general? Outright delusional. And yet both have happened. The once-battered university has returned gloriously to the centre of Canadian life”—and to the top of our rankings in their category for the sixth year in a row. In the same time period, the annual rankings issue has become Maclean’s most-anticipated single issue of the year and an important franchise in its own right. We like to think that Maclean’s had a role in the emergence of McGill and other universities across the country as leaders in the golden age of university education we now live in.

Which is an optimistic thought, isn’t it? There’s a lot of optimism in this issue, in fact, starting on the cover with the thousand-watt smile of Deanna Jarvis, a student at the University of Guelph. Being a mother myself, with a son in university and a daughter on her way, it’s the mother’s hopes expressed in this issue that I keep thinking about. Johanna Schneller, on the now-commonplace university road trip with her daughter Hayley, writes: “My eyes kept filling with tears, not because I’m hormonally challenged, but because the belief that one should dream as grandly as possible moved me.”

And then there’s Frum, who has nightly dinner-table conversations with her teenage twins about where they’ll choose: “I love my kids, like all moms love their kids, and I’m desperate for them to make the right choice. Although now I know that there are a lot of right choices. You can have a great time in a dozen different places. Even though you only get to choose one, it’s hard to get it spectacularly wrong.” The gleam of the future is in their eyes. Just look at Deanna.

Complete university issue and full Ranking results on newstands Nov 11, 2010.

Getting a C in chemistry may not be a barrier to that white coat, as med schools reassess their admissions

If you ever wanted to be a doctor, but were scared off because of all the science you would have to learn, you may soon be in luck. Canadian medical schools are taking a closer look at their admissions practices, and prerequisites like the much-feared Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) are no longer seen to be as imperative as they once were.

Just how picky medical schools should be about students being well-versed in the scientific foundations of human anatomy is a decades-old debate. But now, lacking a solid grasp of science might not be a barrier to getting that white coat.

For 25 years, Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York has reserved around 30 spaces for students who haven’t taken physics, calculus, organic chemistry or the MCAT. A recent study on the Mount Sinai program, co-authored by the school’s dean emeritus Nathan Kase, concluded that students admitted through the humanities and medicine stream “performed at a level equivalent to their premedical classmates.”

In Canada, there are already two medical programs, McMaster University and the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, that have no science requirements, either through course prerequisites or the MCAT. Several others are reviewing their core application requirements.

The University of British Columbia is undergoing a curriculum review that could see a revamping of at least one first-year medicine course so that it no longer presumes an extensive science background. According to Joseph Finkler, associate dean of admissions for medicine, that could open the door to revising the selection process. “It is possible that we will end up with multiple admissions streams, including one without the prerequisites and MCAT,” he said. Lewis Tomalty, Queen’s University’s vice-dean, medical education, says that while some science is “necessary,” encouraging students with a range of academic backgrounds to apply is beneficial to the classroom. “We’re looking at how extensive [science prerequisites] have to be and are certainly looking to change the actual admissions requirements,” he said. Similarly, the Université de Montréal has put a committee in place to review whether its list of science requirements creates an unnecessary barrier to pursuing a career in medicine.

But the school that is farthest along in this process is McGill University. In July, McGill announced that it would no longer require prospective students to take the MCAT. The faculty of medicine will also be reserving three spaces for “non-traditional” students, giving great weight to things like work experience. They will also be exempt from having to complete their first degree full-time, a common prerequisite intended to ensure students can handle the workload. Saleem Razack, assistant dean of admissions at McGill, says these policy changes are needed “so that the excellence that students with diverse life experiences can bring to the medical profession can be assessed and valued.”

The key is finding the right balance, says Miki Rifkin, who oversees the humanities and medicine program at Mount Sinai. While her students are exempt from most science prerequisites, they still have to take introductory chemistry and biology, and have an otherwise exemplary academic record. The goal is to encourage students who might otherwise be deterred at the prospect of the MCAT to pursue medicine. “We want to make a difference for students passionate about some non-science area,” she said.

“The older way of thinking is that doctors should be scholars and scientists first,” says Terry Wuerz, who earned his medical degree from the University of Manitoba in 2007. “I think it’s great that med schools are starting to recognize the different roles doctors play.”

There are, of course, hurdles to reform. Using the MCAT and having science prerequisites are very useful for sorting through thousands of applications. “How do you choose the ones you’re going to interview?” asks Tomalty. While Mount Sinai non-science students do well overall, they do struggle during their first two years, and perform less well on medical licensing exams.

This is consistent with the experience at Canadian schools, says Harold Reiter, chair of admissions at McMaster, but that doesn’t detract from the generally high performance of the non-science students, he said. “Once they have caught up, they do every bit as well as their science-background peers.”

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.

For complete student survey results, click here.

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.”

An unscientific guide to the best and worst in university sports

Top overall

The University of Western Ontario. Last year, the Mustangs won nine OUA (Ontario University Athletics) championships and both the men’s and the women’s national rowing titles, and made it to the final in both football and men’s hockey, and the semifinal in men’s basketball. “There’s a real sports culture at Western,” says Rob Pettapiece, who writes about the Canadian Interuniversity Sports (CIS) league for the CIS Blog—and plenty of jock alum are willing to support the team, in spite of the purple uniforms.

Honourable mention: The UBC Thunderbirds—whose hockey teams now play out of an Olympic venue—have won back-to-back national titles in women’s volleyball, three of the previous six national championships in women’s basketball and 22 of the past 24 national swimming championships. For the past four years, they have been ranked top 10 in basketball, volleyball, soccer, swimming and field hockey, and every couple of years pick up a national title in either soccer or men’s volleyball. While other schools tend to dominate individual sports, UBC spreads its big sports budget widely. Attendance, however, is consistently pathetic.

Honourable mention: University of Alberta, whose men’s and women’s hockey and volleyball teams tend to dominate the Canada West division. Alberta, a traditional powerhouse, has won national titles in every team sport. It consistently fields a bad football team, though—just a warm-up for the real sports, they say in Edmonton.

Top football
Laval University—no contest. Defending national champions the Rouge et Or have won five Vanier Cups in the last 10 years. Laval boasts 18,000 fans per game at PEPS stadium, which recently underwent a $2-million refit. (Western, by comparison, draws 11,000 to its homecoming games.) The program, overseen by ultra-successful head coach Glen Constantin, is flush with cash, and is treated like a pro franchise. It has invested in full-time assistant coaches, with an investors board made up of Quebec business people, and the team goes to Florida for training camp.

Top men’s hockey
In Canada, university hockey plays second fiddle to junior leagues, but the University of New Brunswick Varsity Reds, who have claimed two of the last three national championships, boast a stellar program. Last season, they beat reigning NCAA champions Boston College, whose lineup featured 11 NHL draft choices. UNB standout Rob Hennigar, the Varsity Reds all-time points leader, made the unlikely step from CIS (Canadian Interuniversity Sport) to the NHL, inking a contract with the New York Islanders in 2008.

Top women’s hockey

Back-to-back CIS national champs, the McGill Martlets—who haven’t lost a game in almost two years, dating back to a 2-1 shootout loss to Alberta on Dec. 30, 2007—are the rising women’s hockey powerhouse. Goaltender Charlie Labonte and defenceman Catherine Ward both play for the women’s national team. Martlets head coach Peter Smith is assistant coach of the Olympic national team (previously head coach of the under-21 women’s national team).

Expect McGill’s dominance to continue. Two years ago, the team received a landmark $1-million donation—the biggest ever to a university women’s sports program in Canada. So it’s flush, and has a strong coach with an eye on the country’s top young talent. Smith’s recruiting job isn’t difficult: the appeal of playing for a winning team while surrounded by everything a McGill education and downtown Montreal has to offer is tough to turn down.

Next: Top basketball teams, best rivalry, worst team name, blind arrogance and more

They’re all hard to get into. Which one will you get the most out of?

In its third annual ranking of Canadian law schools, Maclean’s assessed each institution against recognized measures of faculty quality and of how well graduates do in the workplace. In all, we sought to answer two questions. Are a law school’s professors significant contributors to the intellectual life of their discipline? And do a law school’s graduates land the most sought-after jobs in government, the private sector and academia?

For the third year in a row, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law takes the top spot. McGill Faculty of Law also maintains its second-place position for the third year running, but this year it shares that spot with Osgoode Hall Law School, which last year ranked third.

All of the data used in the Maclean’s law rankings are publicly available. All focus on law school outputs. Fifty per cent of the overall ranking is determined by faculty quality, and 50 per cent by graduate quality. The four measures of graduate quality look at the success each law school has had producing graduates able to land the most competitive jobs. The indicators are:

Elite Firm Hiring: Maclean’s calculated how many of each school’s graduates are serving as associates at law firms on Lexpert’s list of the largest firms in nine Canadian regions, or at one of the five leading New York firms, according to the employment website Vault. This was done by examining the online biographies of thousands of lawyers at dozens of law firms. To scale this measure to each school, the tally was divided by first-year class size, averaged over the past three years. This measure is worth 20 per cent.

National Reach: This indicator, based on the Elite Firm Hiring measure, is worth 10 per cent. It measures the proportion of each law school’s grads at leading firms who are working at firms other than the three that hired the most grads from this school. It’s a measure of the extent to which leading firms outside a school’s region hire its graduates.

Supreme Court Clerkships: A measure of how many of a school’s graduates have served as clerks at the Supreme Court of Canada. There are 27 clerks each year; it is one of the most competitive positions open to graduates. Maclean’s looked at the last six years’ worth of clerks. As with the other measures of graduate quality, the tally was divided by each school’s average first-year enrolment.

Next page: Which law school is on top?

BC Diploma, Associate Degree, and Certificate Student Outcomes (DACSO) Survey

Satisfaction

Ninety-five per cent of former students surveyed said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their college education—the same percentage as in the 2006 and 2007 surveys. Eighty-four per cent found the quality of instruction to be good or very good, and 83 per cent rated the helpfulness of instructors as good or very good.

In a similarly positive vein, a large majority of former students said their programs were effective in helping them to develop a range of skills. The percentages of respondents below reported that their programs did well or very well in helping to develop the following skills:

Analyse and think critically 83%

Work effectively with others 82%

Read and comprehend material 81%

Learn on one’s own 81%

Resolve issues or problems 76%

Write clearly and concisely 73%

Speak effectively 73%

Employment

Overall, 80 per cent of respondents were employed at the time of the survey; 62 per cent were employed full-time.

There are marked differences depending on whether students had been enrolled in applied programs—programs designed to lead to employment in specific fields— or arts and sciences programs—programs that often lead to further studies. Not surprisingly, a greater number of former applied students were working full-time. Eighty-five per cent of students who were enrolled in applied programs were employed (72 per cent full-time) as opposed to 66 per cent of former arts and sciences students (31 per cent full-time).

Fifty per cent of employed arts and sciences students had the same job they had while they were in school. Only 26 per cent of this group considered their occupation to be related to their studies. It is likely that many arts and sciences students choose part-time work to help finance further studies. Meanwhile, among the employed group of former applied students, 81 per cent of respondents said their employment was training related; 86 per cent of this group said the knowledge and skills gained from their studies was very or somewhat useful in performing their jobs.

Further Studies

Further education is the priority for many arts and sciences students. Eighty-two per cent of respondents from arts and sciences programs pursued further studies as compared to about one-third of former applied students.

Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey

In 1998, the Ontario government mandated the province’s 24 colleges to collect data for Key Performance Indicators in five areas: graduation rate, employment rate, graduate satisfaction, employer satisfaction and student satisfaction. The purpose of the annual study is to provide college administrators with feedback on the quality of their programs, as well as to provide accountability information to the government and other post-secondary stakeholders in Ontario. The KPI results for graduate employment, graduate satisfaction and employer satisfaction are used to distribute performance funding to the colleges. In addition, the results of these surveys provide prospective students with valuable information when making their post-secondary choices.

GO TO:

Who took part

Highlights

Back to college survey home

Graduates are contacted by telephone and asked for their comments about their college programs and their experiences since leaving college. In order to interview grads six months after graduation, surveys are conducted at three points during the year, each period lasting for eight weeks. If graduates give their consent, their employers are also contacted. A four-week Employer Satisfaction Survey is conducted by phone shortly after each graduate survey. Employers are questioned about how well they feel the college has prepared its graduates to meet their needs as an employer. They are not asked to evaluate the graduate. In the 2008 survey, more than 39,350 graduates completed interviews out of a total graduate population of 59,235. Nearly 8,000 employers took part in the survey.

Meanwhile, student satisfaction surveys are paper based and conducted each February with results tabulated by an external survey consultant. All students beyond first semester are surveyed. More than 109,000 college students completed the latest survey in February 2009. In addition, surveys may be conducted in advance for students in co-op and clinical placements who are unavailable to be surveyed in February and for students who are approved for such non-traditional program delivery options as online or weekend courses.

Note: When displaying the survey results, Maclean’s has ordered the colleges in descending order according to the percentage of survey participants who chose “Very Satisfied/Satisfied” as a response. For the Graduation Rate indicator, colleges are listed in order of those that had the highest percentages for graduation. The Graduate Employment Rate indicator is displayed alphabetically, however, as many factors in addition to post-secondary training can affect employment rates. For its part, Colleges Ontario advises that when considering the survey data “college-to-college comparisons (ranking) could produce misleading results, because of college size, local employment conditions, program mix and graduate demographics. The data from each college should be considered on its own.”

Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey

How satisfied are you with the overall quality of the services in the college?

* Source: Colleges Ontario

Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey

How satisfied are you with the overall quality of the learning experiences in this program?

* Source: Colleges Ontario

Ontario Colleges Key Performance Indicators Survey

This table represents the average of four capstone questions on student satisfaction relating to issues of resources, services and the learning experience.

* Source: Colleges Ontario