Why does Canadian higher education get so little respect? This question is raised by Brad Sweet over in DL discussion http://forums.degreeinfo.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=22913&highlight=canada He writes: “I find it a bit suspect that for the Canada/USA section [in the Shanghai survey above] nearly all the universities in the top 100 are American. While the USA does have good universities, more than 9 of 10 Canadian should have been there.” Perhaps because Canada devotes too much to the middle – not enough to the extremes to have much impact. Of course, people who know Canada, know that Universities like McGill and Toronto are old and estimable places of higher learning. Beyond those two, reputations get thinner but still important in restricted areas of study – University of Western Ontario, for instance, in computing. But despite a well-won reputation for telemarketing fraud, no one in the US can point to mediocrity in higher education in Canada. Those that come close do so only because they are small, have narrow programs, and are unknown outside of the country. Do such restrictions have a price? Or is the issue more general? The Economist magazine has pointed out repeatedly (this fall and in their year-end annual issue) that the world – especially the EC and Great Britain - can learn from the US. As the article puts it, “America's system of higher education is the best in the world. That is because there is no system” (Sep 8th 2005). Could Canada learn as well? The US attitude towards learning presents outsiders with confusing paradoxes: the same country that produces anti-intellectual Republican “dunces” for president also spends more per capita on higher education than any other nation? (5 - 6% of GDP) Why is the US such a mediocrity in basic education, but a world standout at higher ed? Why are the dreaded 17th century Puritan’s also the fomenters of all this veneration of learning? – Today, for example, the Boston area is still the superbowl of North American higher education, with more colleges and universities of respect and world reknown than any city in the world. Education in the US has always been shamelessly practical – unlike Europe’s historic models. Finally, beyond money and enthusiasm, US diversification in types and sheer numbers promotes competition between educational institutions as well as among providers. Consumers and supporters are often made kings and queens. Thus, for America’s formidable private charities, higher ed has long been its favorite benefactor. So, where does that leave Canada? In two words, too placid. Take for instance one widely esteemed measure of educational accomplishment – Nobel Prizes. Canada has 10 Nobels in science (and at least 1 in literature, 2003 – I ignore the Peace Prize since it is more political than academic). http://educ.queensu.ca/~science/main/profdev/pdjsi1.htm By contrast, consider the output of just one important medium-sized private US university – one pretty much unknown outside of the central Mid-West: Washingington University in St. Louis. It has produced 22 Nobels – roughly twice of all of Canada’s accomplishment. http://library.wustl.edu/units/spec/archives/facts/nobelprizes.html Now, anyone can see that that just doesn’t seem fair! But saying so is to identify Canada’s primary problem: overvaluing fairness – not prizing or even tolerating eccentricity or distinctiveness or exceptionalism nearly enough to push the frontiers of knowledge outward. As such, one sees Canada’s higher education problem existing in a long line of national decline, most obviously preceded by The Netherlands centuries ago. While everyone can admit that reputational effects held by universities are only partly justified by performance, Canada fails to leave her mark by failing to risk both failing and accomplishing enough. This is true because no one knows what educational method or research will truly pay off. (If it was knowable in advance, everyone would already be doing it.) Because of this, Canada gets respect, but perhaps little veneration.
al grito de guerra, por favor... Interesting post, Orson. Thanks. I think that I would expand the "famous" list beyond McGill and Trawna, but that's due more to personal on-site experience and anecdotes from my Canadian unindicted coconspirators than on any real survey. I know the Ontario universities best, the Maritimes and Cuckoo Coast universities less well, and the prairie province universities not at all except for punitively-priced (for USers) but o/w fine DL Athabasca. I'd add IMO Laval, Dalhousie, Montreal, and UBC to a top-flight list for starters. I wish somebody who knows the field would give a guide to Mexican universities as well. Everybody knows UNAM, but there's much more out there. I got started on anti-fake degree stuff when another Mexican university very helpfully pointed out that the degree claimed by my then physician was a total fraud (his behaviour had become so weird that I started wondering if he was a real physician or not--he wasn't). My current physician, trained at a first-rate Philippine med school (I checked!), is a near thaumaturge and a NEARLY LIMITLESS improvement.
I wouldn't put too much stock in one internet ranking whose methodology isn't clearly understood and who has already been shown to be at least somewhat inaccurate. Jack
Re: Re: Does Canadian higher ed get no respect? I think that Orson is talking about that Spanish 'webometrics' thing (it isn't really a ranking). We had a thread about it a few weeks ago. (See here.) What they are doing is measuring a university's web impact by counting all the webpages that mention or link to the university. As I wrote last time... good old San Francisco State hit a blistering 241, well ahead of Trinity College Dublin (283), the Ecole Normal Superieure (455) and the U. Witwatersrand (600). Sounds accurate to me! Unfortunately, web impact isn't necessarily the same thing as academic impact. In the same thread, Zvavda posted the top 100 from a worldwide ranking done by the Times Higher Education Supplement, based on citations per academic paper. The top ten: 1 Harvard University US 2 London School of Economics UK 3 University of California, Berkeley US 4 Oxford University UK 5 Chicago University US 6 Stanford University US 7 Yale University US 8 Cambridge University UK 9 Massachusetts Inst of Tech US 10 National University of Singapore Singapore And here's the Canadians on the top 100 list, with the schools immediately above and below them for comparison: 21 New York University US 22 McGill University Canada 23 New South Wales University Australia 29 Warwick University UK 30 University of Toronto Canada =31 Carnegie Mellon University US =31 Sorbonne Paris France =53 Bologna University Italy =53 Stockholm School of Economics Sweden =53 University of British Columbia Canada 56 University of Texas at Austin US
I like these world rankings that are actually based on educational accomplishment (publiications, service, teaching, research) which seem to be the basis for tenured faculty in the states. It seems like CHEA or DoE or someone should have this accomplished already and continually updated. It would be a nice benchmark instead of the commercial rankings put out in the magazines. Granted, Canadian higher ed does seem to be ignored, but is if because of economics, fairness, practicality? One thing is for sure, it is a good higher ed system that educates.
