According to Maclean’s special projects editor Tony Keller, there are going to be some changes to Maclean’s annual university rankings issue, based on criticisms made by U of T president David Naylor and other post-secondary leaders.

“A number of universities have criticized the rankings,” Keller said. “You always expect that, and we have an ongoing conversation in place.”

This running dialogue comes after Naylor’s decision to withdraw from the student survey that Maclean’s ran in its June 26th issue. In the special issue, 54,000 students and recent graduates ranked and commented on their own universities. This is a unique perspective in contrast to the fall ranking, which does not take empirical student opinions into account.

“In April, U of T and a number of other schools decided not to participate, so we ended up requesting their own student survey results and had to use some access to information laws,” Keller added.

There had been rumours that the University of Toronto had pulled out of Maclean’s annual university rankings issue, but this is not the case.

“There is a bit of overlap there,” said Keller. “Naylor turned [the decision to exclude U of T from the graduate rankings] into a discussion about what he doesn’t like about the fall school ranking.”

In his address at the Governing Council meeting on June 29, university president David Naylor stated that there are useful evaluation alternatives beyond bare bones table rankings.

“There are…other principles that are positive and useful in a form that, so far as we can tell, Maclean’s … does not comply with,” he said. “We are continuing dialogue with various media outlets and trying to find a useful way to be measured and rated in the years ahead.”

One primary alternative is the University of Toronto’s own online report, called Measuring Up. The publication gives students over 20 pages of carefully refined data and analysis.

Of this report, Naylor said “it compares us to our peers and to our past record, but does not resort to a simple, aggregated ‘number one,’ ‘number two’ or ‘number three’.”

Naylor’s decision and comments should not, however, be mistaken for sour grapes; he opposes the factors that unfairly lower other schools’ rankings as much as those that lower the position of his own institution.

“Dalhousie…has been 12th in the same league table for the last two years. That relatively low ranking is inconsistent with Dal’s strong reputation among North American scientists as a site for post-doctoral study,” Naylor wrote in an April op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen. “Rankings can’t capture those nuances.”

His analogy of the problem is clear, and involves the problems and difficulties of boiling stacks full of statistics down to one or a few numbers.

“If one of your hands is plunged in boiling water, while the other is frozen in a block of ice, then the average temperature of your two hands is just fine,” he said. “That’s exactly what happens when a range of data about a university are averaged into a single ranking.”

Keller agrees that the Maclean’s rankings could certainly benefit from the constructive criticisms of university leaders.

“Naylor has raised some interesting points that will continue to be addressed,” he said. “There are going to be changes as the discussion continues, and things to announce in the coming months.”

Maclean’s won’t disclose just yet exactly what those changes might entail, but the final product will hit newsstands in November.