MacLeans magazine has announced their annual ranking of Canadian universities, which should appear in the text issue of the popular magazine. The annual ranking has been appearing for many years now, and ranks most Canadian universities after dividing them into different categories based on their size and breadth of program. Clearly, having more categories allows more first-place winners and generally higher scores (having N categories can increase the average score by as much as N/2). This year McGill came first in the category for the biggest research-intensive universities (the "medical doctoral category", meaning only universities with medical schools are included).
In the same category, the University of Toronto and Queen's University were tied for second place. Since I work at McGill and have attended both Queen's and McGill, I guess I have the top three schools covered. They are, of course, all great but I'd choose McGill myself.
I'm now starting to feel that these reports on university rankings are appearing too often in my blog, for example re. the Globe ranking and the Times of London ranking.
This is going to sound a bit too much like the "hype-McGill" blog, but here's how McGill's Principal put it:
"... this autumn has been particularly memorable. In the same week, we learned that two McGill alumni, Willard Boyle (BSc’47, MSc’48, PhD’50) and Jack Szostak (BSc’72), had won Nobel Prizes, and that McGill had moved up in the Times Higher Education-QS World University Ranking to become 18th in the world. McGill is the only Canadian school to rank in the top 25 universities internationally for six years consecutively, and has been North America’s top publicly funded university for two of the past three years. And for the fifth year in a row, McGill was Canada’s number one medical-doctoral university in the Maclean’s magazine university rankings. "
Just to provide some balance, I would like to note that the windows in my office have not been washed for two years, and that the carpet in my student's office is awful. Even though we go to the McGill facility in Barbados for experimental work, the facilities there are very humble and in the old days 10 people shared a single washroom (it's somewhat better now).
