Canada slips in 2014 World Reputation Rankings

Canada has continued to slide down the chart in the Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings, a list of the top 100 universities based on the opinions of scholars around the world.

The same three Canadian schools make the list each year: the University of Toronto, which falls to #20 from #16, McGill University, which falls from #31 to #33 and the University of British Columbia, which also falls from #31 to #33. Toronto, McGill and UBC are also consistently the top schools in the Medical Doctoral category of Maclean’s rankings.

The top five are, predictably, in the United Kingdom and the United States. They are Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Cambridge and Oxford.

Canadians can still be proud that we have more elite universities per capita than some other wealthy nations. Although two countries with smaller populations than Canada’s (34.9 million) have more top 100 institutions—Australia (pop. 22.7 million) has five and the Netherlands (pop. 16.8 million) has four—none of those countries’ schools ranks higher than any of our own, and Canada has more top 100 institutions per capita than France (pop. 65.7 million), which has two, and Germany (81.9 million), which has six.

The 2014 rankings are based on a survey that was available in 10 languages and received 10,536 responses from 133 countries. Scholars were asked to name no more than 15 institutions they believed to be the best, in their own disciplines, for research and teaching, along with questions such as, “Which university would you send your most talented graduates to for the best postgraduate supervision?” For more on Times’ methodology, click here.