Education

Canada’s top party schools 2017

The full list of 47 schools, ranked by average hours spent partying a week, calculated from self-reported data from the Maclean’s student survey

UPDATE: For the 2018 list of Canada’s top party schools, click here.

Maclean’s surveyed more than 17,000 students across Canada late last year to see how they were faring on campus. We asked them to estimate how much time they spend partying each week, and more than 15,000 answered the question, though we didn’t rank any school with fewer than 100 responses. Here, we present a perennial reader favourite: the top party schools for 2017.

Maclean’s tallied the total party hours for each school and divided it by the number of respondents to arrive at our scores. Individual responses ranged from zero to—wait for it—30 hours a week! The national average was 3.27 hours a week, so keep that in mind when you’re comparing schools.

MORE: Ranking Canada’s top schools on how hard they work—and party

If these numbers seem low to some of you, please note more than one-third of our survey respondents are not of the partying persuasion: 5,600 said they did not party at all.

When it comes to the battle of the sexes, the national average for male respondents was 3.59 hours a week compared to 3.27 hours for females, while males at the top party school, St. Francis Xavier in Antigonish, N.S., said they partied 9.15 hours a week compared to 7.7 hours for females.

To read a sober, first-person account of what a busy Friday night is like at a top party school, check out Meagan Campbell’s report from Western University in London, Ont., which came in at #9.



Rank University Party hours per week
1 St. Francis Xavier University 8.01
2 Bishop’s University 7.66
3 Queen’s University 4.94
4 Mount Allison University 4.77
5 Acadia University 4.5
6 Nipissing University 4.49
7 Laurentian University 4.47
8 Wilfrid Laurier University 4.43
9 Western University 4.29
10 University of Guelph 4.04
11 Trent University 3.92
12 Brock University 3.85
13 University of New Brunswick 3.74
14 McGill University 3.58
15 Carleton University 3.51
16 Dalhousie University 3.33
17 St. Thomas University 3.3
18 University of Lethbridge 3.29
19 University of Victoria 3.29
20 University of Ottawa 3.24
21 University of Prince Edward Island 3.15
22 Saint Mary’s University 3.15
23 Concordia University (Montreal) 3.15
24 McMaster University 3.12
25 Lakehead University 3.1
26 Ryerson University 3.09
27 Memorial University of Newfoundland 3.01
28 University of Ontario Institute of Technology 2.99
29 Mount Saint Vincent University 2.93
30 University of Windsor 2.88
31 University of Northern British Columbia 2.76
32 The University of British Columbia 2.69
33 University of Waterloo 2.68
34 Brandon University 2.68
35 University of Saskatchewan 2.62
36 Cape Breton University 2.53
37 University of Alberta 2.39
38 MacEwan University 2.38
39 Mount Royal University 2.38
40 University of Regina 2.36
41 The University of Winnipeg 2.36
42 University of Toronto 2.23
43 University of Calgary 2.13
44 Thompson Rivers University 2.13
45 University of Manitoba 1.91
46 Simon Fraser University 1.88
47 York University 1.82

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