Annual Maclean's magazine university ranking keeps Queen's in fourth place.

By Communications Staff

Maclean’s magazine’s annual rankings keeps Queen’s in fourth place overall among Canadian Medical-Doctoral universities for another year. The category compares institutions offering a broad range of PhD programs and research, and that also have medical schools.

“I’m very pleased to see us holding our own against much larger universities,” says Principal Daniel Woolf. “While rankings don’t always tell the whole story, it’s good to see that we are consistently being placed among the country’s top five universities. These results are a testament to the hard work of our faculty and staff members, as well as to our students’ abilities.”

Queen’s was also ranked eighth of 49 institutions on the national reputational rankings, holding steady in sixth place for “highest quality”, moving up two spots to eighth place for “most innovative”, and moving up five spots from thirteenth to eighth place in the “leaders of tomorrow” category.

Within the Medical-Doctoral category, Queen’s was ranked first overall for the number of awards won by full-time faculty, and second overall for the percentage of the operating budget devoted to student support in the form of scholarships and bursaries. Queen’s is well ranked when it comes to library holdings, placing first for holdings per student.

The average entering grade for Queen’s students remains at 88.7%, or third overall and is ranked first in the country for student retention, with 94.5% of full-time, first-year students returning to campus the subsequent year. Queen’s also holds the top spot for the proportion of students who graduate (92.2%), up slightly from last year (90.8%).

The Maclean’s annual university rankings place universities into one of three categories (Medical- Doctoral, Comprehensive and Primarily Undergraduate) to recognize differences in research funding, diversity offerings and depth of graduate and professional programs. The rankings assess institutions based on a number of performance indicators using the most recent and publicly available data, a good deal of which is provided by Statistics Canada. The financial figures are for fiscal year 2011-12, and student and faculty numbers are for 2010. The reputational category is determined by 8,000 surveys sent to university officials, high school guidance counselors, CEOs, recruiters and the heads of a variety of national and regional organizations.

The complete Maclean’s rankings are available here.