There was an international ranking of universities some time in the last year. The only Canadian university to make the top 20 was McGill. I think that is a load of bull, but maybe that’s because I know McGill too well. FWIW, the top three in Canada are generally considered to be McGill, U Toronto and UBC.
Total wild-ass guess, but I wonder if geography plays a role in this? I’ve often heard the same about Australia - sure, there are schools that are better than others, known better throughout the world, and so on, but most people go to university in their home city. For example, if you’re from Prince Albert, SK, it’s 140 km to the nearest university in Saskatoon. (Not counting some institutes of technology or Aboriginal education - I mean, the closest place to do a plain old psych degree.) If you’re intent upon the Holy Trinity of UofT, UBC and McGill, it’s 1800 km. I imagine a similar situation exists in Australia. Even the major cities have only a few universities each, and we don’t have the density of cities that the US and UK have.
Also, our university admissions system is very different. In Ontario, when I applied for BA programs, I submitted a form with grades from six courses and my three choices, all for $80. They didn’t care about my extracurriculars, my leadership potential, my personal fit with the institution’s culture, or anything. (Of course, for certain programs there are interviews, auditions, portfolios, etc. as appropriate.) So while certain schools boast higher GPA cutoffs than others, there’s no sense that some schools admit only the very best and the brightest, the leaders of tomorrow.
Wow, I come off as a little too interested in comparative higher ed systems, I think!
You are very much correct, while there is certainly feelings of which are better universities in a particular city (UQ is better than QUT for example)* there is no real culture of traveling interstate to a prestigious university.
*Tongue in cheek as I am a UQ student, but I do honestly feel UQ is a better university.
You may be interested in this thread I started a few years ago: How were you admitted to college/university?
I found very few of the people I went to school with chose a school based on geography (although most did stay in-province). Excepting specialized courses like those mentioned above, among employers I think for the most part a degree is a degree but I think just in casual conversation among peers there is a distinct feeling of difference between say Queen’s, Western, or U of T vs. Brock, Trent or Carleton.
In my opinion, the most prestigious French-language university in Canada would be Laval, followed by Montreal. But I don’t think anyone really cares about it. A diploma is a diploma. Though I believe there is some sort of informal competition between the students and professors of the University of Montreal and of the UQAM.
I currently study at the University of Sherbrooke, which is quite well-considered despite being a small university that few outside Quebec would know about. It even attracts students from other regions (I am one of them) and other countries, which as said is somewhat unusual for small universities in Canada.
When I was applying to schools (1989, Long Island), McGill was the only Canadian school that was included in the mix of “name” universities that top students were considering. It was suggested to me a number of times by guidance counselors and the like.
Part of the reason for this is that in the US there is definitely culture of judging schools by whether you’ve heard of them or not and what their reputation is. So no matter how good any of the other universities are, McGill is the one people have heard of. Frankly, it really chaps my hide when people assume that I have a degree from a nothing school because they’ve never heard of Carnegie Mellon. It’s not that they say to themselves “I’ve never heard of it, so I don’t know whether it’s a good school or not.” They say “I’ve never heard of it, so it must be lame.”
So anyway, I would say that in my experience, from the U.S. perspective, McGill is the most prestigious.
As a side note–One thing I couldn’t figure out at the time was why on earth so many people were talking about going to school in the Yukon. I mean, I don’t care how good of a school it is–it made exactly zero sense that these typical Long Island types would want to go the the freakin’ YUKON TERRITORY for college!!
If you haven’t figured it out yet, they were really talking aboutUConn. The University of Connecticut.
:smack:
Is Simon Fraser considered part of UBC? I thought it was pretty well regarded but no one has mentioned it in this thread.
As a techie geek, I’ve always thought well of Ryerson. Five years ago I was looking at degree programs in New Media and there were very few places offering them, Ryerson being the most high profile.
Another thing about post-secondary education in Canada is that you don’t necessarily have to go to a traditional university to get respect. Sheridan isn’t a traditional university (at least, from the looks of it) but is well regarded in arts and media circles.
But that’s pretty much exactly what we’re talking about. The distance between Queen’s and Western is about 450 km. If that was my geographical restriction for higher education (and it kind of was), I would have had two choices, Saskatchewan or Regina. I briefly considered Alberta, but in reality, they had nothing different to offer for the added cost (two of my brothers were at U of S at the time).
I don’t really think it is particularly american. Most people here go to school based on geography too. They end up going to in state 4 year colleges or community colleges for the most part. If you live in Ohio then chances are you get a tertiary education in a public college in Ohio.
Down here when people do want to go to a top tier school, it is usually because they feel they’d be more challenged than they would at a local school. The people I know who ended up at placed like MIT or CalTech did it because they wanted the challenge more than anything and because they wanted to work with the smartest and the best of the best.
The geographies that seem to obsess over school rankings are southeast asian cultures from what I can tell (South Korea, China, etc).
MBAs are supposedly one of the few degrees where it actually does matter where you go to school. That is my understanding. For almost everything else, it is fairly irrelevant.
Yeah, I’m probably getting my impressions from watching too much American tv. 
Many schools in the U.S. do not - or are beginning to not - cooperate with the U.S. News and World Report rankings. Regardless of cooperation, both MacLean’s and the U.S. News’ methods of ranking schools are inherently flawed for numerous reasons.
Canada does have a few prestigious schools. An internationally prestigious school is the University of Waterloo. It has the world’s largest co-op program and one of the best engineering programs in the world. Furthermore, it is one of a handful of school’s in North America to have a Mathematics faculty.
Spain, France and Italy don’t. Like the situation described for Canada, there are specific schools which are known to be best for specific programs, but while Deusto has superb programs in Taxation Law and Business Law, they’ve got more than two dozen other programs which nobody outside their province has heard about; Universidad de Navarra was the top Medical school in the country for decades and is now in direct and wobbly competition with Granada, but I have no idea what else can one study in Granada, and I know what else can be studied in UNa only because it’s local to me.
I believe it may be linked, at least in part, to whether students have to join a specific program from the start or not and to how flexible the program definitions are. My Spanish undergrad didn’t involve choosing any elective subjects: we had to choose subprograms, but “Chemical Engineer” defined 75% of the subjects you’d take and choosing the specialty defined the other 25%. My 8-years-younger brother got to study under the next national variant: he had one or two electives every year but if you’re in Business School and there’s a course called “English for Business Students,” gee, wonder what did 95% of them choose! And the other 5%? Why, “French for Business Students.” For some reason, not a single one chose “Stoma Surgery” or “Dye Techniques in Microscopy,” which were also available.