Con U Ranks last

Concordia has placed last for the second year in a row in the Maclean’s magazine’s annual ranking of Canadian universities. But some universities, including Concordia, aren’t cooperating.
The rankings, released on Monday, put Concordia last among Canada’s 11 “comprehensive universities,” which have both graduate and undergraduate programs, but don’t have a medical school.
“We do not participate; we do not recognize it as a legitimate ranking,” said Concordia spokesperson Chris Mota. “There were a number of universities that were very concerned with the methodology used by Maclean’s and really saw it as not scientific.”
But Maclean’s said it no longer matters if Concordia doesn’t want to participate.
“We actually don’t ask any university for information,” said Tony Keller, managing editor for special projects at Maclean’s. “We changed the system two years ago so that the ranking is based entirely on publicly available data.”
One of the factors taken into account by the magazine is the ratio of fulltime professors to students.
“If Concordia had relatively more fulltime professors and relatively fewer students for each one of those full time professors, Concordia would do better on student faculty ratio,” said Keller.
However he said the magazine doesn’t take into account the number of part-time faculty, who teach many of the classes at Concordia.
“This is one of the challenges,” he said. “There are no good stats in Canada covering that. So I would like to be able to measure class sizes, that would be a great thing to measure, but such data on a national, universal, comprehensive basis doesn’t exist.”
Some schools question the usefulness of rankings entirely.
“How can you really rank universities?” said John Danakas, director of public affairs at the University of Manitoba, which placed last among universities with medical schools.
“Does it really serve any meaningful purpose for students? I mean are we talking about top-10 football teams here, or post-secondary educational institutions?
“They’ve chosen to rank based on a number of categories that for the most part are easy for them to get information on, more than anything else, rather than how meaningful it will be for students,” said Danakas.
He said most students choose their school based on what program they want to study. “None of that is reflected in the Maclean’s rankings, ironically enough. They don’t even address specific programs at universities.”
But some of the most controversial factors in the ranking system are no longer included, said Keller.
Concordia had taken issue with the way the rankings measured graduation rates, which they felt unfairly penalized Concordia because of its high percentage of part-time students.
“One of the things that has been important to Maclean’s in the past is what percentage of students actually graduate in a three to four year period . . . that may work for some universities but it doesn’t work for Concordia,” said Mota. “What is one of our main missions? Part-time education.
“If you’ve got a part-timer that takes eight or nine years to get through the system because they’re doing it part-time, does that lessen the quality of education at Concordia? Does that mean we should rate further down the list when it comes to graduation rates?” she said.
But Keller said that while Maclean’s still includes the information in their issue it no longer factors into the overall ranking.
But the Maclean’s ranking is not alone, last month the Globe and Mail released their university rankings, where Concordia did much better.
“Their survey has different results because it’s a very different exercise,” said Keller. “The Globe is basically doing a survey of students and asking them in a variety of different ways ‘do you like your university?'”
He said the Globe and Mail survey, “is a valid thing to do, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you who’s really learning and what are they learning and what are they accomplishing and what are they getting out of their education.”
According to Keller, one way Concordia could move up in the rankings is if more Concordia students won national awards.

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