Rankings rated at Maclean's

Yearly grumbling from universities seems to have moderated as results of a popular annual survey of Canadian universities appeared on news-stands this month.

University officials still complain that Maclean's magazine still fails to recognise institutions' difficult-to-standardise but important accomplishments. But Canada's universities are learning to accept the annual ranking of universities as a necessary part of the higher education landscape. The magazine's impact, with a weekly readership of 2.4 million, has not been ignored by English Canadian colleges. After a widespread boycott, the final three universities rejoined the 42 participating universities.

All of the country's English-language universities now take part but only one French-language institution, the Universite de Montreal does. In the sixth edition of the survey, the University of Toronto, Simon Fraser University in Burnaby British Columbia and Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick won top ranking, in the three categories - of medical/doctoral, comprehensive and primarily undergraduate.

The Maclean's survey, unlike virtually all other countries' higher education surveys, goes beyond ranking by reputation and divides an institution's identity into 22 different categories, including class ratios, numbers of faculty with PhDs, student service expenditure and library acquisitions.

After the furore of the first year, the magazine went to considerable lengths to improve its standing and decided to meet with the universities' association and individual administrators to try and understand the nature of their complaints. The main grievance was the magazine's lack of transparency. No one knew what made one university different from another. Since that time, the magazine has been displaying data and methodology and has received positive reactions. But the universities are still complaining about one large part of the 42-page section of profiles and issues, what Maclean's calls their "sizzle", i.e. the rankings.

"It gives one the assumption that if you've fallen into last place, you're no good," said Ed Unrau, a spokesman for the University of Manitoba, which was 13th of 13 in the category of medical/doctoral - universities that offer a broad range of PhD programmes and research, as well as a medical school.

Arthur May, president of the Memorial University of Newfoundland said: "It's insulting to the intelligence to rank universities but it is the survey's entertainment factor."