The University of Victoria has vaulted at least a couple of dozen positions to land at No. 173 among the world’s top 200 universities, according to the London-based Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
UVic moved up from an unspecified rank between 201 to 225 last year to join seven other Canadian universities in the top echelon.
The California Institute of Technology has ranked first, followed by Harvard, for the past four years. The top-ranked Canadian school was the University of Toronto at No. 20.
“These rankings reflect again the exceptional work being done by the talented faculty at the University of Victoria that benefits our students, our community and the country,” UVic president Jamie Cassels said in a statement.
The rankings help students select institutions, academics to make career decisions, research teams to identify new partners and university managers to set strategic priorities, the school said.
The rankings list 400 schools in all. After the top 200, the rankings are not broken down and schools are listed in groups of 25.
While there is always some movement, UVic started to move up the rankings when Times Higher Education changed its methodology in 2010 to place more emphasis on teaching, research and knowledge transfer and less on a university’s age and size.
Since then, UVic has been ranked as the top-ranked university in Canada without a medical school. In 2013, the school was ranked first in Canada and 20th globally among universities under 50 years old.
In the current overall rankings, UVic is nestled behind Nottingham in the U.K. and tied with Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The rankings are said to be the most comprehensive and carefully calibrated, using 13 performance indicators to assess teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.
Apart from the University of Toronto and UVic, all other Canadian top 200 universities lost ground, according to the Times Higher Education website.
Other than elite institutions, U.S. universities are struggling even though seven of the top 10 are in the U.S., except for Oxford (3) Cambridge (5) and Imperial College London (9).
The U.S. is down three in the top 200 to 74, with more than half of those falling an average of five places since last year, the web article states.
The U.K. lost three universities from the top 200 while Asian institutions rose to 24. The University of Tokyo and the National University of Singapore are in the top 25.
Germany gained two places in the top 200 to overtake the Netherlands and rank third overall behind the U.S. and the UK.
“Western universities, in many cases starved of vital public funding, are losing ground,” said Phil Baty, Times Higher Education rankings editor, in an interview on the website. There is “something approaching a crisis” for American state institutions, he added.
That in turn has major significance for scientific output and competitiveness, said Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College (ranked 126), who blamed the “serious hit” in funding to prominent American public universities.
On average, Canada has a better higher education system than the U.S., Altbach said, without the peaks and valleys of U.S. rankings.
Canada’s “top universities are excellent, but could easily be even better if they had the additional funding — and probably the competitive spirit — needed,” he said.
Canadian universities in the rankings
20. University of Toronto
32. University of British Columbia
39. McGill University
94. McMaster University
113. Université de Montréal
124. University of Alberta
173. University of Victoria
188. University of Ottawa
226-250. Simon Fraser University, University of Calgary, Carleton University, Dalhousie University, Université Laval, Western University, York University
251-275. Queen’s University, University of Waterloo
To view the full rankings, go to thewur.com.
