On Campus

Canadian schools shine in global ranking

Does your university fall in the World Universities Top 500?

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto ranks 26th worldwide.

The Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) is well-respected, mainly because the annual Chinese study uses six objective criteria to compare schools. The rankers consider every university in the world that has at least one Nobel Laureate, fields medalist, highly-cited researcher or researcher published in Nature or Science. Indeed, those criteria make up most of their methodology, which can bias the rankings toward science-intensive, anglophone schools.

Canada does quite well again this year, with its Top 100 schools all falling fairly close to where they were five years ago. And despite having only one in 200 of the world’s people, we have four of the world’s Top 100 schools. That ratio is beat only by the U.S., which has 52 per cent of the world’s Top 100 schools, but just 4.5 per cent of the global population and the United Kingdom, which has 10 per cent of the Top 100 schools, but just one per cent of the world’s people.

The study also reaffirms the University of Toronto’s place as global research powerhouse. No school from Australia, France, Germany, China, Israel or Scandinavia beat the University of Toronto, which is at number 26. In the Top 25, the U.S. has 20 winners, the U.K. has three. Japan and Switzerland have one each.  Here’s a list of the 23 Canadian schools that made the Top 500.

26. University of Toronto (24. in 2006)

37. University of British Columbia (36. in 2006)

64. McGill University (62. in 2006)

89. McMaster University (90. in 2006)

101-200. University of Alberta, University of Montreal, University of Calgary and University of Waterloo

201-300. Dalhousie University, Laval University, Queen’s University, Simon Fraser University, University of Western Ontario, University of Guelph, University of Manitoba, University of Ottawa, University of Victoria and University of Saskatchewan

401-500. Carleton University, University of Quebec, University of Sherbrooke and York University

Want more rankings? For the results of the Maclean’s 20th Annual University Rankings, click here. For the QS World Rankings by subject, click here, here and here.

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