I thought I had posted a couple of days ago on this Maclean's article about the latest QS University Rankings. Yet the post does not seem to be there, so I must have inadvertently deleted it. Anyway, long story short, the article is about how Canadian universities fared, and one point they make is that U of A is the only one to appear in the top 200 for all 29 disciplines.
I found that weak tea, since inspection of the actual disciplinary rankings show that only one program (Pharmacy) received an actual unique ranking (25; well done!). All of the others were in the 50-100, 101-150 or 151-200 generic cohorts. In fact, it appears that well over half are in the 101-200 group, which really does not seem to be a very elite group, looking at the other institutions there.
I'm not sure I understand their methodology. It seems to include contributions from three categories, academic reputation, employer reputation, and citations per faculty member. The categories are weighted differently for different disciplines. To be candid, even after re-reading the descriptions, I'm not sure how one distinguishes between "academic reputation," and "employer reputation." However, I can imagine that the U of A's overall standing (rated 100 in the latest QS survey) is not providing the sort of "halo effect" that departments at places like U of T (23), McGill (17) and UBC (51) can expect. Indeed, in my own discipline, we are ranked in the 101-150 group, whereas McGill's corresponding program is in the top 50--even though it is widely felt in Canada that U of A's program in this particular field is in the top 3 in the country, whereas McGill's is maybe in the top 10, but not one of the elite ones. In other words, I guess I'm saying that the U of A's mediocre reputation as a university is probably dragging down some very good programs in these subject rankings, because of the way they are computed.
