Maclean's University Rankings 2023

1. Medical/Doctoral: This category includes Canadian universities that offer a wide range of research opportunities, PhD Programs, etc. All universities included have medical schools.

2. Comprehensive: This category includes Canadian universities that conduct a remarkable amount of research activities and offer a broad range of programs at both undergraduate, and graduate levels (including professional degrees).

3. Primarily undergraduate: This category includes Canadian universities that focus on undergraduate studies, with relatively few graduate students and graduate programs.

Maclean’s also releases a ‘Top schools by reputation’ ranking where university faculty and senior administrators along with notable businesspeople across the country are interviewed about their insights on innovation and quality at Canadian universities. Top universities by student satisfaction are based on the opinions of professors and staff on residence life, extracurricular activities, and experiential education (like co-op programs).

At an initial level, Maclean’s places a university in any of the three categories mentioned above. This is based on the type of institution, level of research funding, diversity in course offering and breadth and depth of professional and graduate programs. Further, in each category, an institution is classified into five types based on 13 performance indices. 

Note: Data includes all federated and affiliated institutions and excludes: 

• All schools with less than 1,000 full-time students
• Schools restricted due to religious or specialised mission
• Newly designated universities
• Schools that are not a member of the national association Universities Canada

Parameters on which Maclean’s weighs institutions are:


Multiple student-centric factors are considered among which the most notable ones include data of students who win national academic awards over the previous five years or prestigious awards or scholarships etc. Each university’s total number of students who won awards is divided by its number of full-time students, which gives a per-student count. Also, the student-¬faculty ratio of graduate and undergraduate students is of significant importance. 

In this, primarily the calibre of faculty is considered by the number of major awards won by them over the past five years with the capacity to scale up institution size. Thus, the award count for a university is divided by the school’s total number of full-time faculty. The rankings also calculate the extent of success of a certain faculty to secure research grants from their respective provincial jurisdictions followed by approvals from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Grants for social sciences, humanities and medical science are all separate indicators.

The section examines how much money is available for current expenses per full-time-equivalent student. To further widen the scope, total research dollars are also considered, including the size of an institution’s full-time faculty, income from sponsored research or funding (federal/ provincial/ foreign government/ non-government).

To analyse the assistance extended to students, percentage of the budget spent on student services as well as scholarships and bursaries are amounted. 

The section solicits views of professionals who are in a position to express or state opinions on how well these universities meet the needs of their students along with how ready the graduates are to start their careers.

*Source: https://www.macleans.ca/education/canadas-best-universities-by-student-satisfaction-rankings-2022/

*Source: https://www.macleans.ca/education/university-rankings/canadas-best-primarily-undergraduate-universities-rankings-2022/

University rankings are a great tool to help evaluate which institution you want to enrol in your higher studies. To understand this in detail and to find your best fit, get in touch with our international education specialists who can guide you all through the way.