“The recent presidential election has spurred plenty of comparisons of how U.S. public policy stacks up against our neighbors to the north, from health care to gun control. Perhaps we should add higher education to that list.
Canada’s three most-prominent universities — the University of Toronto, McGill University, and the University of British Columbia — enroll a total of 110,000 undergraduates. That’s more students than the top 17 U.S. universities in the U.S. News & World Report rankings combined.”
Uh, that’s because Canada doesn’t have any elite privates.
UMich, UW-Madison, and UDub (rough equivalents to UToronto, McGill, and UBC in quality and stature) enroll roughly that much or more.
However, that means that the average size of Toronto, McGill, and UBC is in the ballpark of that of many prominent state universities in the US.
Using the “top 17 USNWR” US universities is just a way to make the comparison look more different, since most of the “top USNWR” US universities are small private universities.
^Indeed
If you could say (if you define the Upper Midwest as MI, WI, MN, and the Dakotas), that the most prominent unis in the Upper Midwest (UMich, UW-Madison, UMTC) educate a ton more students than the most prominent unis in New England like Harvard, Yale, and MIT. Then discuss the differences in education policy between New England and the Upper Midwest.
Longtime lurker here from north of the border.
U of T, McGill, and UBC derive their prestige from their professional and graduate programs and from research. There is nothing prestigious about their undergraduate programs. At the level of undergraduate studies all Canadian universities are pretty much the same and they are all accredited and regulated by the respective provincial governments. The fact that some consider certain schools to be more prestigious has very little basis in fact. The most you can say is that certain specific programs at certain specific schools are highly selective and therefore more prestigious. That is for the most part restricted to the areas of engineering, computer science, and commerce. There are a sprinkling of health/life/med sciences programs that might fall into that category as well. With regards to engineering and computer science, the University of Waterloo would rank higher than the 3 schools listed above in terms of selectivity.
As the parent of a high schooler who has been researching post-secondary education for some time now I can tell you that I am actively encouraging my gifted high achieving 10th grader to look to other schools. The reality of undergraduate education in Canada in the larger institutions, and especially those in Ontario, is that for your first 2 years you are a nameless faceless revenue generating bum in a seat who will be lucky to have a tenured professor actually teaching your class. In first year in particular you can look forward to 250+ fellow students in your lectures and no one is going to be particularly interested in whether or not you pass or fail. If you manage to make it into 3rd year then that changes but you’ve got to make it that far. Very few employers hiring new graduates in fields outside of the 3 I mention above will value an undergraduate degree from any one university more than another. Graduate school is a different story.
Personally as the parent of a child who loves learning I am highly jealous of the options for schools you have in the U.S., especially your LACs. For all the talk of the handful of smaller primarily undergraduate universities here that call themselves LACs, they really can not hold a torch to the more selective schools you have. DS15’s dream would be to attend MIT. You would be hard pressed to find a high school student here in Canada whose dream is to attend U of T, McGill, or UBC. What I can say about the Canadian university model is that it is far more affordable. Even if by a miracle DS15 were to be accepted to MIT it’s highly unlikely we could afford the price tag.
Again, the top Canadian unis are publics, so it’s fair to compare them to giant American publics (and research powerhouses) like UW-Madison/UT-Austin/UDub.
Don’t understand the jealousy, though; you can apply to the elite American privates as well and they’re equally unaffordable to Americans who don’t get fin aid.
And your publics are generally more affordable than our publics.
There is no public as affordable and has as impressive alumni list as Waterloo CS, for instance (Cal is close but costs more).
What I’m jealous of is all the choices you have for smaller schools that are academically selective. The smaller primarily undergraduate university choices we have here in Canada tend to be not as selective, and those that are, have low retention and graduation rates. In Ontario where we live the average entering grades of the students in these smaller schools is significantly lower than those at the larger schools and these smaller schools still have really high teacher/student ratios in the first 2 years.
“The recent presidential election has spurred plenty of comparisons of how U.S. public policy stacks up against our neighbors to the north, from health care to gun control. Perhaps we should add higher education to that list.”
That doesn’t mean it is better. I think this article completely ignores the fact that for many of these schools it wouldn’t be possible for drastically accept so many new students. They simply don’t have the resources or space to do so. Also those colleges are designed that way for a reason, smaller class sizes and more student-professor interaction remains a desired trait among those universities. It is that way for a reason.
I seriously doubt if those universities accepted more students we would suddenly see a rise in a better prepared workforce “in the national interest” because that relies greatly on the argument of prestige. It implies that it is the prestige and graduating from those universities that make them great, not the individual student themselves.
This article is so full of faulty logic that it frustrates me greatly
@gwnorth, but nothing’s stopping you from applying to those LAC’s so you have those exact same choices! At the same cost!
It’s not as if those private LAC’s offer in-state or in-country discounts. . .
Canadians do not go away to university to the same extent as Americans do. This is due in part to many of our state flagships being in remote college towns. McGill, Toronto and UBC have a large contingent of commuter students. To many it is grade 13, 14 etc.
My son graduated from McGill and had an incredible experience there and in Montreal. If he had been born and raised in Montreal his experience would likely have been quite different and not as special.
@gwnorth If your son does not get into a selective US school I recommend he consider McGill and open himself up the French language and the Québécois culture. It would certainly be a different experience than if he commutes to U of T, McMaster or the closest university to wherever you live in Ontario.
@PurpleTitan what I mean is I wish we had those options in Canada at our prices.
@gwnorth ^^^^Ah there’s the rub. You tend to get what you pay for.
@TomSrOfBoston true. It’s unfortunate because I personally think small is a better model and I like the idea of a true liberal arts education. The focus here has become all about the financial viability of post-secondary education with the championing of STEM above all else. Learning for the sake of learning, which I argue is the true purpose of university, has been pushed to the side in favour of career training which until recently was the purview of community colleges. We wouldn’t dream of cramming 250 students into a high school class but it is viewed as acceptable in post-secondary education. In Canada small = less rigorous not prestigious.
@gwnorth LOL But at McGill the largest Faculty is Arts and that fact has given McGill the reputation of being the Berkeley of Canada, or perhaps the Oberlin of Canada.
Part of my comment 9 that you referred to was deleted when I added to it. I stated that small is not valued in Canadian higher education.
But @gwnorth what about Mount Allison, Acadia and the like? Those aren’t that different from an American LAC, right?
@ShrimpBurrito According to Macleans Mount Allison has a 77% first year retention rate and a 56% 6 year graduation rate. That is far below McGill etc, and is comparable to third tier directional schools in the US e.g. Oklahoma Panhandle State University (that is a real school name).
lol I’ve driven by Oklahoma Panhandle State. 
I have heard some nice things about Mount Allison here on CC. Enough to make me research it for my D.
@ShrimpBurrito I am actually going to be encouraging DS15 to look at some those schools, specifically Acadia and the University of King’s College, both in Nova Scotia but they are a bit smaller than what I was thinking as ideal. Going out of province to school is also a bit of a mental leap for us as we don’t have the same tradition of travelling that far from home for school as you seem to have for students going OOS to study. I’m not sure DS15 will want to go that far away. There are also correspondingly higher tuition and transportation costs, but better chances for merit scholarships.
My one reservation about these schools is that even though they are fairly selective based on minimum entering grades, their retention and graduation rates aren’t that hot. We’ll be touring them this summer so we’ll see. Another alternative maybe special limited enrolment programs at a larger school.
@TomSrOfBoston it is very possible that McGill is underrated here in Canada. Part of that maybe it’s location in Quebec and historically it’s uneasy relationship with the rest of Canada. I laugh when I read here on CC that McGill is compared to some of the more prestigious schools in the US. We certainly don’t view it that way here. It’s still a really large school.
We’ve got “nameless faceless revenue generating bums,” here too, ya know.