Nov 17, 2000
|
THE UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA Nov 17, 2000 |
| Another November, another top four finish for the University of Victoria in the comprehensive university category of Maclean’s magazine’s annual ranking of Canadian universities. UVic is ranked fourth this year. Since 1992, when the comprehensive category was created, UVic has finished first twice, third three times, and fourth on four occasions. There were 11 universities in the comprehensive group this year. The other members of what has become the traditional top four club in the category are Simon Fraser University, which comes first by the magazine’s calculation this year, Guelph which placed second under the Maclean’s formula, and Waterloo, which is assigned third. Maclean’s defines comprehensive universities as those with a significant amount of research activity and a wide range of undergraduate and graduate programs. Maclean’s uses 21 measures to rank universities. This year UVic places first in the faculty receiving medical and science research grants measure, and third in the proportion of incoming students with a grade point average of 75 per cent or higher, in faculty receiving humanities and social science research grants, and in the number of library holdings per student. UVic is ranked fourth in five other categories, including the reputational survey, a notable success for a university located away from the eastern and Lower Mainland media centres. It finishes tenth in alumni support and, in what may be an indication of the impact of government funding policies, places ninth in both third- and fourth-year class sizes, and in classes taught by tenured faculty. UVic President Dave Turpin says the results in the research grant categories recognize the strength of the university’s faculty in scholarship and research. Overall, the rankings also confirm UVic’s place among the top comprehensive universities in the country, he says. But according to Turpin, the “real value of the rankings are that once a year the best-selling issue of Canada’s national newsmagazine focuses on universities and the challenges they face and, in a forceful and articulate way, makes the case for additional government support for universities.” In a news release accompanying this year’s rankings, Maclean’s identifies the underfunding of universities as a major issue that has “compromised the quality of undergraduate learning” at many universities. It also points to the dramatically increasing demand for university spots and the competition to hire new faculty in the next 10 years as looming issues. “Access — and access to excellence — will be the key issues of the next decade,” predicts Ann Dowsett Johnston, assistant managing editor of Maclean’s. UBC places second out of 15 in Maclean’s medical/doctoral category, while UNBC ends up 10th out of 21 primarily undergraduate universities. The annual survey has attracted criticism for the magazine’s unwillingness to disclose the actual scores for each institution. Critics charge that the lack of information about the scores masks the closeness of the competition and turns it into an oversimplified horse race. The validity of the measures chosen and the relative weights assigned to each of the various categories in the Maclean’s formula have also been questioned. In an interview last year, Dowsett Johnston told The Ring that while “it’s not fair to say that there are no differences in the scores ... there’s definitely a pooling of four very strong universities at the top in the comprehensive category.” |