Big schools bail out of Maclean's rankings

Eleven of Canada's top universities, including several of its largest and oldest, have told Maclean's to take a hike; they will not be participating in the annual university rankings, which they have long complained are arbitrary, unfair and unrepresentative. In the past, some other universities have demurred (and were simply left out of the rankings), but it will be a significant blow to the rankings to have large universities like the University of Toronto, University of Alberta, McMaster and Dalhousie refuse to cooperate.

The special issue of the magazine (and an expanded newsstand-only spinoff) has been a perennial money-spinner for Maclean's for more than a decade. It has been promoted as highly valued by parents and university-bound students for determining which school to go to. (Some universities have also been refusing to take part in a companion survey of graduate satisfaction, on the newsstands now.)

The universities said, in a letter to Maclean's, that they were pulling out because they question its methodology. “In short, the ranking methodology used by Maclean’s is oversimplified and arbitrary,” says the letter. “We 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.”

The universities are apparently not bailing out because they didn't do well in the rankings: University of Toronto routinely comes out first in various specialty categories; U of A ranked sixth in 2005 in the medical doctoral category. The paradox is that the larger universities can afford to go their own way, relying on their own image and gravitas.

UPDATE: Tony Keller, the managing editor of Maclean's in charge of special projects, told CBC.ca: "All of the information is available publicly. So the decision of some universities to say they are not going to fill out an information form that we sent them doesn't really change anything." However, instead of the university administrations crunching the numbers and filling out the questionnaires, now Maclean's will have to pay for research to be done into those publicly available sources. How much this will cramp the project's profitability, only Maclean's knows.