Have I mentioned that I Hate Unions?

[Ben Kenobi]

I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people here have never heard of it...

Consider yourself educated.

It's actually quite well ranked in the Maclean's magazine.

http://www.unbc.ca/releases/2006/11_02macleans.html

[Kuciwalker]

For the second year in a row, UNBC has been ranked by Maclean’s as the best small university in all of western Canada.

That means approximately nothing

[Ben Kenobi]

So what do you do, Ben?

I run my own tutoring business.

(And no, I can't get you a job )

Oh, I'm sure of that.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker

For the second year in a row, UNBC has been ranked by Maclean’s as the best small university in all of western Canada.

That means approximately nothing

Seriously -- what are the others?

I think even the University of Lethbridge is too big to compare.

The quality of students at UNBC is very high. While UNBC provides access to students who graduate from high school with a 65% average or greater,

LOL.

65% minimum to get into this school? And they still only have 3500 students? Holy ****, low standards.

BTW, the Macleans ratings are a joke. Basically, if your students love your school you're rated highly. It's a brutal metric that no one really trusts in the real world. The best universities in Canada tend not to participate at all anymore.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi


I run my own tutoring business.

Please let this not be in Canada...

[Ben Kenobi]

It's ranked 4th in the nation.

Funny how you can comment on what the stat means without knowing anything about it.

This is the latest ranking.

Acadia
Mount Allison
St. FX
UNBC
Trent
Lethbridge
Wilfred Laurier
UPEI
WInnipeg
Laurentian
Lakehead
Moncton
Ryerson
St. Mary's
Brock
Mt. St. Vincent
Bishop's
Brandon
St. Thomas
Nipissing
Cape Breton.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
It's ranked 4th in the nation.

Funny how you can comment on what the stat means without knowing anything about it.

This is the latest ranking.

Acadia
Mount Allison
St. FX
UNBC
Trent
Lethbridge
Wilfred Laurier
UPEI
WInnipeg
Laurentian
Lakehead
Moncton
Ryerson
St. Mary's
Brock
Mt. St. Vincent
Bishop's
Brandon
St. Thomas
Nipissing
Cape Breton.

Yep, all kinds of crap schools.

"Best small university in Western Canada" and "4th best small university in Canada" are ridiculous by the highly-criticized Macleans metric -- this is a joke, right?

[Ninot]

The only school I'd want to go to out of any of those is Ryerson, and that's only so I could say I went to the same school as Jay Onrait

[Ben Kenobi]

65% minimum to get into this school? And they still only have 3500 students? Holy ****, low standards.

You might want to quote the full sentence.

While UNBC provides access to students who graduate from high school with a 65% average or greater, 40% of new UNBC students entered with an A average. The average entering grade of all first-year students is nearly 82%.

BTW, the Macleans ratings are a joke. Basically, if your students love your school you're rated highly. It's a brutal metric that no one really trusts in the real world. The best universities in Canada tend not to participate at all anymore.

Oh, they don't?

I didn't know you were so high on York. Yes, York withdrew, because they never did very well in the first place. It's one thing to dislike the metric, quite another to withdraw because the metric reflects poorly on the university.

Brandon, Laurentian and Trent are the other four, again, 4 small universities, that didn't like the fact that they ranked low on the list.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
Oh, they don't?

I didn't know you were so high on York. Yes, York withdrew, because they never did very well in the first place. It's one thing to dislike the metric, quite another to withdraw because the metric reflects poorly on the university.

York is far from the only university to pull out of the rankings.

Do your research.

Here's some of them from an open letter in 2006:

http://dalnews.dal.ca/2006/08/14/macleans.html

Dear Mr. Keller:

We regret to advise you that our universities will not be participating in the 2006 Maclean’s questionnaire.

We share Maclean’s goal of providing good information for students and their families who are researching post-secondary education. We also compliment you on your editorial coverage of the post-secondary sector. Many of the articles in Maclean's have contributed to the national discussion about post secondary education, and have helped to frame students’ choices. Our concern relates specifically to Maclean's attempts to generate a global ranking of Canadian universities.

In various ways and for some years, many institutional spokespersons have expressed considerable reservations about the methodology used in the Maclean’s university survey and the validity of some of the measures used. Thus far, these serious concerns have gone largely unaddressed, and there is still no evidence that Maclean’s intends to respond to them.

We welcome public assessment of our work, and all our institutions devote significant resources to that end. We already publish a great deal of data about our own institutions on-line and intend to publish more in future, ideally in the form of standardized datasets that will facilitate valid temporal and institutional comparisons. However, it is truly hard for us to justify the investment of public funds required to generate customized data for your survey when those data are compiled in ways that we regard as over-simplified and arbitrary.

Our concerns about Maclean’s misuse of data in its rankings issue can be briefly recapitulated here.

To begin with, the Maclean’s rankings aggregate data from a range of variables related to the student body, class sizes, faculty, finances, library and reputation. It is inappropriate to aggregate information across a range of programs at a large and multi-dimensional research university into a single ranking number. Consider how such an approach might pervert one’s understanding of a general hospital that is ranked #1 in obstetrics and #10 in cancer care. Averaging these rankings would result in this hospital being ranked “#5 overall�. For the patient seeking care in one of these areas, such a measure would be useless at best and misleading at worst. This is, effectively, the method that Maclean’s applies to Canadian universities by its calculation of “league tables� based on the arbitrary assignment of weights to variables which, by themselves, are of questionable validity. The variables selected by Maclean’s also fail to capture the breadth of experiences students say are important in their university education such as, for example, extra-curricular activities or the opportunity for rich and diverse interactions with peers and faculty outside the classroom.

We are also concerned by Maclean’s recent attempt to draw comparisons of student experience across incomparable surveys of student engagement, and Maclean's reliance on survey data with low response rates and all the associated response biases that arise from skewed profiles of respondents. The responsible compilation and comparison of data is a core tenet of academic research. Several universities already show student survey data, in context, on their own web sites and question Maclean's decision to pull different kinds of data out of context and compare “apples and oranges�. Maclean’s treatment of these survey data, in our view, fails to give appropriate notice to these methodological limitations.

It is not just the Maclean’s student survey that has suffered from low response rates. Equally troubling is the fact that a clear majority of individuals who receive the Maclean's reputational survey do not respond. This is a particular concern as the results of the reputational survey not only affect rankings in a significant way, but are given prominence separately by your magazine.

This is only a partial accounting of the methodological flaws in the Maclean’s rankings. In short, the ranking methodology used by Maclean’s is oversimplified and arbitrary. We do find it ironic that universities are being asked to subsidize and legitimize this flawed methodology, when many faculty, staff and students at our institutions are dedicated in their research to ensuring that data are collected rigorously and analyzed meticulously.

We remain open to the possibility of collaborating with Maclean’s at some future date, particularly if we can agree on means to ensure that the data will be valid and the analyses truly informative. Meanwhile, we will continue to publish data on our websites to facilitate informed student and family choice.

Yours truly,

Tom Traves, Dalhousie University
Peter George, McMaster University
Michael Stevenson, Simon Fraser University
Indira Samarasekera, University of Alberta
Stephen Toope, University of British Columbia
Harvey Weingarten, University of Calgary
William Cade, University of Lethbridge
Emoke Szathmary, University of Manitoba
Luc Vinet, University of Montreal
Gilles Patry, University of Ottawa
David Naylor, University of Toronto

[Kuciwalker]

"Best university in Canada" isn't particularly more discriminating than "best small university in Western Canada", Ben.

[Ben Kenobi]

Please let this not be in Canada...

My students seem happy.

Like I said, if you want a job working the phones for me, then you are welcome to apply.

[Ben Kenobi]

It is inappropriate to aggregate information across a range of programs at a large and multi-dimensional research university into a single ranking number.

Well tough. What's the point of doing the survey otherwise?

Yes, it is arbitrary, the weights assigned to each category. That is why you read the article for the individual numbers and the comparisons therein. That is far more valuable then simply looking at the number 1.

The universities do not like the fact that the rankings have a significant influence on their enrollment counts. If the universities are willing to submit a superior methodology that would allow more of an accurate evaluation, then that would be cool. I don't seen anything in their list that says they would be willing to subscribe to such a measure when conducted independently and outside of their influence.

[Ben Kenobi]

"Best university in Canada" isn't particularly more discriminating than "best small university in Western Canada", Ben.

On an international scale? I think it would have cachet, we have very good universities up here. Maybe not as prestigious as Harvard or Yale, or Cambridge and Oxford, but those are few and far between.

[Ninot]

Thanks Asher. I always thought Maclean's was full of ****, and it always irked me when my ex would say Mount Allison was so amazing, just look at how high it was ranked on Maclean's after all!

You have shown me the truth