Daily BrewCanadian schools no longer in top 20 of prestigious World University Rankings
Each September brings a fresh crop of Canada's brightest to the University of Toronto's beautiful downtown campus.
And while the school still sits in the top tier of the country's institutions of higher learning, U of T has fallen from its top 20 perch in a respected international university rankings list.
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings, released on Wednesday, revealed that the University of Toronto had slipped to spot 21 — down two places from last year's No. 19 spot — where it now peers up at its competition from the underside of the prestigious top 20 group.
Though it would be easy to dismiss any rankings as an arbitrary exercise, most schools take these lists very seriously.
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U of T's president Dave Naylor told the Toronto Star that the drop has him rankled.
"This is a bit of wakeup call. It's not a huge alarm bell, but I think we ignore this set of signposts at our peril," Naylor said, adding that the slip was a "concerning trend."
But Canada's top university is still looking good compared to how swiftly some of its competition has fallen.
The University of British Columbia, ranked second among Canadian universities on the list, dropped eight spots from 22nd to 30th place.
And despite its international reputation, Montreal's McGill University slipped to 34th place, down from the 28th spot last year.
A few bright spots included the University of Montreal cracking the Top 100 at spot 84, while the University of Ottawa jumped up 14 places to settle in at No. 171.
The list follows last month's QS World University Rankings, a list that holds McGill, U of T and UBC at Nos. 18, 19, and 45, respectively.
Ranking criteria tends to vary from each list. Some place higher value on academic reputation while others evaluate elements like faculty accomplishment and teacher-to-student ratio in higher stead.
Due, in part, to these disparities, and to the more complex factors these lists fail to take into account, critics are often wary of the results.
James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, told the Star he doesn't place much faith in the way these independent experts arrive at their conclusions.
"This is a very precise ranking built on a soft underbelly of mushy data," he said.
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But even if students are now tempted to get their degrees elsewhere, Canada seems keen to retain its skilled workforce, even enticing international grads with attractive immigration incentives.
The Telegraph reports that Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is scheduled to hit England next week and that part of his agenda will involve the "wooing" of unemployed British graduates to fill positions in our IT, engineering, welding and video games programming fields.
Unfortunately, the same welcome mat does not apply if you graduated more than a decade before this year's rankings list came out.
