Survey says....bye!

Some of Canada's most prominent Universities have told MacLean's they will no longer be participating in the magazine's annual University rankings. This page says it's about time, and it's a good time since MacLean's has undergone an editorial makeover which makes the National Post look like The New Internationalist.

The rankings have never worked, throwing disproportionate praise on old money schools like Queens and McGill and trashing the relatively newer kids on the block like Simon Fraser and Calgary. To win the MacLean's survey, a school needs to have lots of well-heeled alumni and a three-year Arts degree. Schools that relied more on reduced public funding in the face of increasing enrollment perpetually rank further down the list.

Students are repeatedly told that some kind of post-secondary education is essential to survive in today's job market. In the face of a sizeable demographic shift, employers are desperate to recruit new talented and educated staff. If such is the case, is it not in the country's best economic interest to create a national University system which has schools cooperating rather than competing to develop those talented and educated individuals? Canada needs all of its Universities doing whatever it is they're best at, and it needs to be accessible to students, rather than a race to the bottom for research grants and tuition fees.

The MacLean's rankings of Universities are as instructive as the Fraser Institute's rankings of high schools: both are manipulative attempts to destroy public education by making it a commodity. This page is happy to see the Universities boycott, and would also like to see a University release rankings for which Canadian magazines the public should bother with.