Eighty-Seventh

"Eighty-Seventh", November 2007

Most of us are familiar with the rankings that Maclean’s magazine puts out each year (and perhaps it may have influenced our choice of where to go…if you could decipher it that is…), but there are international university rankings as well. Although Maclean’s has the national market covered, looking at more global systems is probably a better bet.

One of the most popular is the Academic Ranking of Universities, which is published yearly. This year, McMaster placed in a three-way tie for eighty-seventh, with the United States’ Rice University, and Germany’s Goettingen University. Only three other Canadian schools scored higher than Mac. Consequently, only four Canadian universities were on the top one hundred list at all.

The University of Toronto was in a two-way tie for twenty-third, University of British Columbia was thirty-sixth, and McGill was sixty-third. Canada has over ninety universities in total, and yet they didn’t make this list. I suppose then that says something about McMaster’s reputation, doesn’t it?

See Queens, we are better than you! And U of T: yeah, you may have better academics, but at least most of us aren’t failing something and have sports teams that actually place. As for Brock…well, it’s Brock. That one is just waaay too easy.

If you want to see the full list of ratings, check out the website here: http://www.arwu.org/rank/2007/ARWU2007_Top100.htm. If you check out the main website, you can see how they rate the schools, on what criteria, as well as the scores from 2003 onward.

Commentary on the Macleans ranking is soon to come!