York University has held its standing among Canada’s comprehensive universities and registered significant improvements in the area of student grades, according to the annual university rankings by Maclean’s magazine.
The rankings, published yesterday, cover data collected in the 2003-2004 academic year, the first official year of the double cohort. “As a large urban university, our primary goal leading up to the double cohort was to prepare for larger admissions and invest in ways to accommodate the increase in students seeking admission to York,” said Chief Communications Officer Richard Fisher. “We’ve succeeded in what was a very challenging year and even improved in some important indicators.”
York registered significant improvements in the areas of student-entry grades (York’s average grade: 80.5 per cent) and the number of new students with an average of 75 per cent or better (at York: 80.91 per cent). York also received a strong showing in the Value-Added category – described by Maclean’s as “going the distance with their students” – where York placed sixth out of 47 institutions. This is a complex output measure which correlates student average entering grades with graduation rates and student awards.
York’s overall ranking in the comprehensive category remained No. 8. In this category, the number of faculty with PhDs and the number of awards per full-time faculty increased noticeably, placing York at No. 2 and No. 3 respectively. York also gained a No. 2 ranking for the percentage of its budget dedicated to student scholarships and bursaries. It ranked No. 5 in the reputational category “Leaders of Tomorrow”, as it did last year.
The Maclean’s University rankings are an annual survey of 47 Canadian universities from primarily undergraduate institutions to medical-doctoral universities.