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McGill Ties University of Toronto As Top Med School in Maclean's Rankings

Posted on: Sunday, 6 November 2005, 18:00 CST

By MIKE OLIVEIRA

TORONTO (CP) - Maclean's magazine released its annual ranking of Canadian universities Sunday and for the first time in 10 years, the University of Toronto has lost the distinction of being called the top medical school in Canada. Now it shares the honour for top marks with McGill University.

The top rankings are identical to last year's in the undergraduate category, with St. Francis Xavier University first, followed by Mount Allison University and Acadia University.

The University of Waterloo took top spot once again in the comprehensive category, while the University of Victoria leaped past the University of Guelph into second place.

The annual university rankings appear in the new issue of Maclean's, which states the ratings are more important than ever given the current climate of inadequate education funding.

The findings should be a message to Prime Minister Paul Martin that the government needs to do more for post-secondary education, said Ann Dowsett Johnston, editor-at-large for Maclean's.

"This is a public-policy wakeup call . . . and I think it's especially important right now, given that since 1987 we've seen a 50 per cent growth in enrolment in Canadian universities and only a seven per cent growth in hiring of faculty," Dowsett Johnston said.

"We've seen much, much more crowded classrooms and a strain on all sorts of things."

She said the med-school tie between McGill and the University of Toronto has less to do with actual changes compared to last year and more to do with the recent challenges faced by Ontario universities.

She said that of the 17 Ontario universities, eight fell in this year's rankings, seven held steady and only two improved.

"What this reflects is enormous growth, (no) huge investment and the universities are having a lot of trouble," she said.

Dowsett Johnston also blamed the slip on the double cohort - which caused enrolment to spike last year when Ontario eliminated Grade 13 or the OAC year - and the fact that 40 per cent of university students go to school in Ontario.

The rankings are based on data in up to 24 categories including enrolment grades, class sizes, calibre of faculty and quality of libraries.

The annual issue is often used by parents and students to research prospective schools but the Canadian Federation of Students said the rankings are more about selling magazines than comparing universities.

"Quality is so often such a hard thing to determine and define. Any attempt to really define that quality is flawed from the beginning," said CFS national chairperson George Soule.

Dowsett Johnston countered that the rankings are meant to be a guide and are not an arbiter of which schools are the best.

"It isn't really meant to tell students or parents where you should choose to go to university, as much as to say how are universities faring."

Soule did say that if there's one thing the rankings prove, it's that high tuition fees are not directly linked to a better education.

"If you look at a place like Dalhousie University with some of the highest tuition fees in the country they actually rated quite low on the scale (at No. 13 on the medical school list), versus an institution like McGill in Quebec, where tuition fees have been frozen for close to the last 35 years," he said.

"I think if anything, Maclean's numbers show high tuition fees do not actually result in a higher quality (of education)."

Source: Canadian Press

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