All Posts Tagged With: "university rankings"

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE TOOL The annual Maclean’s rankings assess Canadian universities on a range of performance indicators in six broad areas. The Maclean’s ranking tool lets you create a customized ranking by selecting whichever indicators matter most to you, and deciding how much weight to give to each indicator to contribute to the [...]

CLICK HERE TO GO TO THE TOOL

The annual Maclean’s rankings assess Canadian universities on a range of performance indicators in six broad areas. The Maclean’s ranking tool lets you create a customized ranking by selecting whichever indicators matter most to you, and deciding how much weight to give to each indicator to contribute to the final score.

Here is a description of each indicator used in the Maclean’s ranking tool.

STUDENTS/CLASSES

Student Awards
Maclean’s calculates the number of students over the past five years who have won national academic awards. The list includes 40 fellowship and prize programs, encompassing more than 18,000 individual awards. Each university’s total of student awards is divided by its number of full-time students, yielding a per student count.

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

FACULTY

Awards per Full-time Faculty
Maclean’s calculates the number of faculty over the past five years who have won major national awards from more than 40 awards programs covering a total of 860 awards. To scale for institution size, the award count for each university is divided by each school’s number of full-time faculty.

Social Sciences and Humanities Grants
Maclean’s measures the success of faculty in securing research grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), taking into account both the number and the dollar value received in the previous year, and dividing the totals by each institution’s full-time faculty count.

Medical/Science Grants
Maclean’s measures the success of faculty in securing research grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), taking into account both the number and the dollar value received in the previous year, and dividing the totals by each institution’s full-time faculty count.

RESOURCES

Total Research Dollars
Maclean’s measures total research dollars, including income from sponsored research, such as grants and contracts, federal, provincial and foreign government funding, and funding from non-governmental organizations. This figure is calculated relative to the size of each institution’s full-time faculty.

Operating Budget
This section examines the amount of money available for current expenses per weighted full-time-equivalent student. Students are weighted according to their level of study—bachelor, master’s or doctorate—and their program of study.

STUDENT SUPPORT

Scholarships & Bursaries
This indicator calculates the percentage of a university’s operating budget spent on scholarships and bursaries.

Student Services
This indicator calculates the percentage of a university’s operating budget spent on student services.

LIBRARY

Expenses
This indicator calculates the percentage of a university’s operating budget allocated to library services.

Acquisitions
This indicator calculates the percentage of the library budget spent on updating the collection. In acknowledging a shift from the traditional library model—books on shelves—to an electronic access model, this measure includes spending on electronic resources.

Holdings per Students
This indicator calculates the number of volumes and volume equivalents per number of full-time-equivalent students.

REPUTATION

Reputational Survey
Maclean’s solicits the views of university officials at each ranked institution, high school guidance counsellors from every province and territory, the heads of a wide variety of national and regional organizations, and CEOs and recruiters at corporations large and small. Respondents rated the universities on quality and innovation.

Our 132-page guide to Canada’s top schools is out now

Masters student Theo Mlynowski examines core samples at the University of Northern British Columbia (Photo by Simon Hayter)

The 22nd annual Maclean’s University Rankings issue—the holy book for anyone planning their education in Canada—is now available on newsstands and tablets.

The 2013 issue, our biggest-ever, features 132 pages of charts, stories and advice designed to help future students choose the right school, while sparking conversations on the quality of the post-secondary experience from the size of classes to the cost of textbooks.

The issue also offers a peek inside campus life from coast to coast, including an examination of the viral videos phenomenon, a deeper look at the scourge of drinking, Emma Teitel on fraternities, the college advantage and pages more. There are online extras, too, like photo tours of life at 24 campuses.

And, of course, the issue features the 22nd annual rankings.

Continue reading The 2013 Maclean’s University Rankings

Primarily Undergraduate universities are largely focused on undergraduate education with fewer graduate programs

For the other categories, click here.

* Indicates a tie

Only two of 19 schools improve their positions

Students at Guelph (Jessica Darmanin)

Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings are out and most of our schools are down.

Only two of 19 Canadian universities on the Top 400 list improved their positions—the University of Ottawa and the University of Montreal.

One explanation for this year’s poorer performance is that our schools are losing ground against institutions in Asia, particularly in places like Singapore and South Korea. (See here.)

Despite the tumble, Canada still has more schools on the list than most countries. Only the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands have more in the Top 200.

Below are where our universities fell in the 2012-13 Times World Rankings, along with where they sat in the 2011 Maclean’s University Rankings. Stay tuned—our 2012 rankings will be out soon.

21. University of Toronto (2nd in Maclean’s Medical-Doctoral)

30. University of British Columbia (3rd in Maclean’s Medical-Doctoral)

34. McGill University (1st in Maclean’s Medical-Doctoral)

84. University of Montreal (12th in Maclean’s Medical-Doctoral)
Continue reading Canadian universities drop in Times World Rankings

Subject rankings for science, medicine, engineering…

Here are the top five highest ranked universities in the QS World University Rankings by Subject and the rankings of Canadian schools in science, engineering, and health disciplines. For arts, humanities and business, click here. For the full rankings, visit TopUniversities.com.

Pharmacy

1. Harvard University (United States)
2. University of Cambridge (United Kingdom)
3. National University of Singapore (NUS) (Singapore)
4. University of Oxford (United Kingdom)
5. Karolinska Institute (Sweden)

11. University of Toronto
25. University of Alberta
26. University of British Columbia
29. McGill University
51-100. Western University, Université de Montréal
101-150. University of Waterloo
151-200. Dalhousie University, Laval University, University of Saskatchewan

Medicine

Continue reading How Canadian schools stack up in the QS rankings (part one)

Asian Tigers and Australia dominate new ranking

#34. University of Victoria (Photo by Darren Stone)

University rankings often favour older institutions, because, in many cases, older schools have bigger endowments, more alumni and prestige.

The new QS Top 50 under 50 ranking takes the age-bias into account by removing all the universities founded before 1962.

Young schools are ranked on the same six criteria used in the QS World Top 300 ranking: academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per faculty, student/faculty ratio, international student ratio and international faculty ratio.

But the results are very different. In the World Top 300 rankings, the U.S. and U.K. dominate. Canada has 14 entries, but none are in the Top 50.

Continue reading Only three Canadian universities in “Top 50 under 50″

How guidance is failing our students

Photo by Andrew Tolson

From the 21st Maclean’s University Rankings issue—on newsstands now.

Until mid-July, 25-year-old James Douglas pretty much had his life planned out. A fourth-year political science student at a major Canadian university, he anticipated finishing his degree at the end of the summer semester, in August, and graduating with his B.A. this fall. Douglas was in touch with several prospective employers in Toronto, his hometown, as well as in Ottawa, and had allowed the lease on his apartment to lapse. Then he received the phone call that upended all of that.

The call came from the registrar’s office, and informed Douglas that his application for graduation had been turned down. At issue was a three-credit course taken early in his career that his academic adviser had sworn up and down could be put toward his degree as an elective. Not so, the registrar’s office now said. At his entreaties, university officials dug into “some dusty book with fine print on p. 709” and pronounced the course in question as unfit to count toward his poli-sci B.A.

Continue reading Really bad advice

Does your university fall in the World Universities Top 500?

The University of Toronto ranks 26th worldwide.

The Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) is well-respected, mainly because the annual Chinese study uses six objective criteria to compare schools. The rankers consider every university in the world that has at least one Nobel Laureate, fields medalist, highly-cited researcher or researcher published in Nature or Science. Indeed, those criteria make up most of their methodology, which can bias the rankings toward science-intensive, anglophone schools.

Canada does quite well again this year, with its Top 100 schools all falling fairly close to where they were five years ago. And despite having only one in 200 of the world’s people, we have four of the world’s Top 100 schools. That ratio is beat only by the U.S., which has 52 per cent of the world’s Top 100 schools, but just 4.5 per cent of the global population and the United Kingdom, which has 10 per cent of the Top 100 schools, but just one per cent of the world’s people.

The study also reaffirms the University of Toronto’s place as global research powerhouse. No school from Australia, France, Germany, China, Israel or Scandinavia beat the University of Toronto, which is at number 26. In the Top 25, the U.S. has 20 winners, the U.K. has three. Japan and Switzerland have one each.  Here’s a list of the 23 Canadian schools that made the Top 500.

26. University of Toronto (24. in 2006)

37. University of British Columbia (36. in 2006)

64. McGill University (62. in 2006)

89. McMaster University (90. in 2006)

101-200. University of Alberta, University of Montreal, University of Calgary and University of Waterloo

201-300. Dalhousie University, Laval University, Queen’s University, Simon Fraser University, University of Western Ontario, University of Guelph, University of Manitoba, University of Ottawa, University of Victoria and University of Saskatchewan

401-500. Carleton University, University of Quebec, University of Sherbrooke and York University

Want more rankings? For the results of the Maclean’s 20th Annual University Rankings, click here. For the QS World Rankings by subject, click here, here and here.

If you’re living on a scurvy diet of raisin bread and Stove Top Stuffing, Maclean’s is here to help

Four 21 year-old University of Toronto undergraduate students are gathered around the table in their Woodsworth College residence’s communal kitchen on a recent Friday night inspecting a bounty of fresh vegetables. “Leeks!” shouts Tingting Zhang, a psychology and neuroscience major who could point out the difference between a ganglia and an axon in her sleep, but takes childlike delight in recognizing the ubiquitous vegetable before her roommates do. Karen Sohn, an economics and psychology major, holds a bunch of thin grass-like spears. “Chives?” It’s more of a question than an answer. Aaron Shapland, who studies Middle Eastern civilization and geographical information systems, takes the easy road and correctly identifies the lone red onion. Meanwhile, the bag of baby arugula stumps Dorin Manase, who studies biology and computer science. In fact, they’re all baffled. “Is that leaves?” asks Tingting. “It tastes like nuts.” In an age when all things gastronomic are featured front and centre in television, movies and blogs, you might think this bunch would be more food-savvy. But as Karen pops a yellow-coloured cherry tomato into her mouth, she confesses, “you couldn’t find four people who make more disgusting food.”

Maclean’s is here to help. We’re armed with three simple recipes, for a soup, pasta and mussels. All require just one pot, minimal ingredients and extremely basic kitchen know-how. Our mission is to get these four students eating better fare than Stove Top Stuffing, pasta topped with ketchup, and Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup poured on top of a microwaved chicken breast, “Chicken à la King”: staple student meals from the 1990s. Surely times have changed.

Click here for budget friendly recipes

Nobu Adilman, actor, writer, and one of the hosts of the Food Network’s Food Jammers, who graduated from Halifax’s Dalhousie in 1995, says, “It’s a matter of having only so many minutes in a day. You’ve got so much s–t flying at you and you don’t want to spend all that time on cooking. So you just eat to soak up the booze.”

Most students juggle full course loads, part-time jobs and extracurricular activities, which doesn’t leave a lot of free time to visit farmers’ markets, let alone plan a week’s worth of meals. Luckily, in downtown Toronto there are other options: “I don’t know if you saw the hotdog vendor across the street, but she’s going to be my best friend next week during exams,” says Aaron as he chops an onion. Dorin, who just finished an exam, ate cereal for his last three meals, while Tingting polished off an entire loaf of raisin bread yesterday: “Breakfast, lunch and dinner, just in my room,” she says. “I didn’t even use a plate because I was cramming: I had two assignments due.”

Click here to watch cooking lesson (video)

Bestselling cookbook author Bonnie Stern, who also runs a Toronto cooking school, has a brighter outlook on students’ eating habits. “They’re much more savvy than they used to be because of the Food Network. They love that feeling of making something—the excitement of it. It’s very cool now.” She ought to know: for the last 15 years her school has offered a university survival class for students leaving home for the first time. “They do have a short attention span so we try to just do one class and then pack it full.” One of the most popular recipes is an Asian-inspired salad dressing, named after her daughter Anna, “who went through all of university without eating a salad.”

Not all university students are clueless come dinnertime. Amanda Garbutt, 22, has been preparing meals since her first year at McGill University in 2006. “I would whip up something in the floor’s kitchen and no one else could even fry an egg.” Soon she was teaching her roommate basic kitchen fundamentals. “We’d buy identical ingredients and split the stove in half and she’d take the left side and I would take the right and we’d make identical meals.” Friends started coming over to watch. “They’d bring wine and it became a social event. And then I came up with BYOI, bring your own ingredients, and I would pick a recipe—a risotto, stew or soup—and assign everyone an ingredient to bring and it would end up being very cost-effective, and we’d all take turns stirring and chopping. It was fun.”

April Engelberg, also 22, met Amanda on their first day at McGill and came up with the idea of filming these sessions. The result was The Hot Plate, a show launched through TV McGill, the University’s student-run television station, in the fall of 2008. Engelberg and Garbutt, who graduated this May, are now developing The Hot Plate’s website, which features about a dozen instructional videos for simple dinners, and their cookbook, which comes out this month.

Like Stern, Engelberg has “noticed a massive trend toward students caring more about cooking. It’s cool to say last night I made risotto, and people are always taking pictures of their food and posting them.” Still, Garbutt says, “Some students go for the McGill pizza down the street. ‘Two bucks? I can do that for breakfast, lunch and dinner until I get scurvy.’ I actually know someone who got scurvy from a pure mac and cheese diet.”

Back in the Maclean’s kitchen, so far scurvy-free, we’ve hit a few snags. Tingting discloses that they don’t have a cheese grater. “I usually use a potato peeler,” she says. There’s also no measuring cup—no measuring device of any sort. More surprising is the absence of a colander from the kitchen of this pasta-loving group. “We use our hands,” says Tingting. “It’s not what you’re supposed to do?” When her three roommates cast steely glares in her direction, she adds, “We wash our hands first.” “Welcome to college,” says Aaron.

After they devour the leek and potato soup, which Tingting says “tastes like it’s from a restaurant,” the pasta is successfully drained, sans colander, and tossed simply with extra virgin olive oil, ricotta salata, cherry tomatoes and basil. “Mmm,” they hum. We do a second version with a handful of the arugula mixed in—a clever way to sneak a salad into a main dish. “I like it,” says Dorin, who’d earlier confessed to usually eating just meat. “I was skeptical. But it’s really good.”

The last recipe for curried coconut mussels, courtesy of Chatelaine, requires the most effort out of our three dishes—that is if you consider ripping out a few beards from the shells laborious. Not only are these bovines cheap (Chatelaine’s food editor, Claire Tansey, says they usually cost about two dollars for 250 grams) but they’re also high in zinc, protein and omega-3 fatty acids. Pair them with a buttered baguette and call it dinner.

The four students gather round two kilos of steaming mussels piled high in a stainless steel bowl; not an ideal serving vessel for hot food, but it worked in a pinch. They all like mussels, but this was their first time making them. It’s also the first meal these roommates have shared since moving in together this September, although you’d be hard-pressed to tell: as they dunk their bread into the sauce and devour dinner, they talk and laugh as though this were a typical evening. “We should definitely do this again next Friday night,” says Aaron. Mission accomplished.

How to be a student locavore

Top tips from Canadian local food movement leaders Sarah Elton, author of Locavore, and Nick Saul, executive director of The Stop, a Toronto-based organization that strives to make healthy food available to everyone through community building, cooking, gardening, and food banks.

Get organized: “Students are great at pushing policy forward and getting their administrations to change,” says Elton, food writer and columnist for CBC Radio’s Here and Now in Toronto. She suggests students push to get “the university to have food procurement protocol that guarantees a certain percentage of food comes from local and sustainable farms.” Which is exactly what Local Food Plus, a non-profit organization committed to creating local sustainable food systems, did when they first teamed up with Aramark food services in 2005: a partnership that resulted in 10 per cent of the food served at U of T’s Aramark venues being certified local and sustainable, a figure they hope to increase to 25 per cent this year.

Buy in bulk: “It’s an affordable way of buying local,” says Elton. “Or buy directly from farmers. If a group of people share a purchase, it can ease the financial burden of a one time pay-out.”

Start or join a co-op: That’s what Elton did in university. “Choose one that focuses on buying local and sustainable food. I was able to buy great food at a price I could afford.”

Ask questions: Nick Saul of The Stop says, “Do a bit of a food audit on campus; that could extend to asking, ‘Why do we have these crappy pop machines?’ Or, ‘Why is the cantina serviced by these big bad companies?’ Doing a bit of muckraking in that sector is really important and can make a big change fast.”

Start a cooking collective or garden: “The food movement is pretty robust,” says Saul, “and I can’t imagine it not finding its way onto campuses, whether that’s more individually expressed through a house on campus where everyone is interested in local, organic, sustainable food and they figure out a cooking collective, or they take over a green space and have collective gardens or individual plots—that could easily make a pretty big mark.”