McGill University is still the country’s top school, although it has lost a little ground. The recently released QS University Rankings ranked the Montreal school 19th in the world.
Although its ranking has slipped slightly from 18th last year, it remains the highest-ranked university in Canada.
The University of Toronto is second-best with a rank of 29 overall.
London-based firm QS TopUniversities has produced a website that provides world university rankings since 2004.
McGill, classified as a large, fully comprehensive research-focused school, received a total score of 89.25 out of 100.
According to QS’ description, McGill earned its spot by having “21 faculties and more than 300 study fields,” serving “34,000 students through hands-on research opportunities, international exchange, internships, field-study and study abroad programs.”
“McGill is always honoured to be considered one of the world’s leading universities,” said Vaughan Dowie, the executive head of public affairs at McGill.
Meanwhile, the University of Toronto ranked 29th, the same result as last year, with a total score of 84.29.
“The University of Toronto is Canada’s most research-intensive university and is consistently rated as one of the best in the world for its research output and academic reputation. In fact, the QS results show that U of T’s subject-specific rankings remain number one in Canada,” said Laurie Stephens, the director of media relations and stakeholder communications at U of T.
QS classified U of T as a “very large” school because it had 59,439 students in total, compared to McGill, which has just over 35,000. It was considered a “fully comprehensive” school with a “very high” research focus. The head of research at QS, Ben Sowter, said the size classifications “are not intended as a scale of quality.”
“Being a larger institution is not necessarily better,” he said.
“The idea behind the classifications is provide people with a way to filter down to a narrower group of similar institutions,” Sowter said.
Carleton University falls into an undeclared rank between 401 to 450 in this year’s QS ranking system, slipping down from 386 last year.
“We have participated in this ranking system in the past but found that they used faulty data which they would not correct. Therefore, we chose not to participate this year so the result is not meaningful,” said Carleton media relations officer Lin Moody.
Rankings are based on the academic reputation index and the faculty-student index, which “are based on two surveys distributed to academics and employers worldwide attracting over 15,000 and 5,000 responses respectively,” Sowter explained.
There are also other determinations, such as the citations per faculty, which is “drawn from Scopus – the world’s largest abstract and citations database.” The employer reputation index and the international factors are “gathered from central statistics sources where available, or institutions directly,” Sowter added.
The University of British Columbia, ranked 44th, and the University of Alberta, 78th, were the other Canadian schools in the top 100.