The Globe and Mail released a University Report Card last Wednesday and all three U of T campuses occupied the bottom rankings when it came to the quality of education. Out of 38 universities, Scarborough ranked 36th; St. George, 37th and Mississauga dead last. The top three were Trent University, Brock University and the University of Guelph.
The survey was done by the Globe and Mail in partnership with Uthink and The Strategic Counsel, both market research firms that have offices in Toronto. The study was done earlier this year when students who were members of the Studentsawards.com Web site responded to more than 100 questions online. Students were not asked to rank each university, but were asked about their personal experiences and perceptions of their own university. More than 26,400 students took part in the survey, which was a 28 per cent increase from last year.
There were mixed reactions about the survey. David Farrar, vice president and provost, told News@UofT the student sample was selective. He said the survey was not a random sample of students, but from students who were members of Studentawards.com. Furthermore, Ashley Morton, president of SAC and Ranjini Ghosh, president of ASSU, both told News@UofT they felt the survey was not reliable. “It’s frustrating. I’m not an expert but I have concerns about the methodology, especially when I see the same schools in the same city having widely different rankings in the category of opportunity for fun off campus. McGill is ranked #1 and Concordia is ranked #16 and they’re six blocks apart in Montreal,” said Morton.
Michael Sullivan, co-founder of The Strategic Counsel, acknowledged the criticisms and said they were reasonable but believed the results were justified. He explained that while the students were indeed a selective group, the sample size was still very large. Moreover, Sullivan and his research team have done previous research and found there were no significant differences between students who were members of the Web site and those who were not. “We found that students who were members were just more concerned about scholarships and bursaries, there was no real difference,” said Sullivan.
And in response to Morton’s comment, Sullivan said the difference in ranking between McGill and Concordia was based on the actual composition of the student body. According to Sullivan, most of the students attending Concordia lived at home while a large portion of the students from McGill came from elsewhere. Therefore, their views of the city and ideas of fun would logically be very different.
Furthermore, Sullivan did not feel that size was a major determining factor for U of T’s low rankings. “The survey focused on individual student’s experience and it asked them what they thought about their personal education. So it was a different focus,” said Sullivan. U of T has a total student body of 63,109 and an operating budget of $977.6 million. Compared to Trent University, which has a total enrollment of 6,410 and an operating budget of $46.3 million, U of T is easily 10 times the size of Trent.
Like Morton and Ghosh, Alison Chick, a third-year engineering student, felt the survey was subjective. “U of T is hard because it guides you to the next step, like grad school. It’s doesn’t focus on smaller classes and things like that. And of course we would rank lower than most universities when it comes to libraries…we have so many libraries and so many books…of course it will be harder to find a book here than in other universities where they have smaller libraries. I feel sorry for those people who use the survey and decide to go to Trent,” said Chick.
Christine Hwang, also a third-year student said, “It’s funny how we came last but our reputation is so good. It’s like what is our reputation based on then?”
For more information on university rankings from the report visit www.universityreportcard.com.
