The annual Times Higher Education “Top 100 Under 50” universities came out a few weeks ago.  Australians were crowing about their success, and a few people in Canada noticed that Canada didn’t do so well – only four spots: Calgary 22nd, Simon Fraser 27th, UQAM 85th, and Concordia 96th.   So, today, we ask the question: why do young Canadian universities not fare well on these rankings?

Well, one way to look at this is to ask: “who does well at these rankings?”  And the answer, as usual, is that the ones that make it to the very, very top are some pretty specialized, ludicrously well-funded places, which have no obvious Canadian equivalent.  For example:

• ETH Lausanne (top school) has 5,000 undergraduates and 4,500 graduate students, making it Harvard-like in its student balance.  They do this despite, in theory, having an open-access system in place for domestic students; in practice, weaker students self-select out Lausanne because the failure rate in year 1 is so high (roughly 50%, higher in Math and Physics).  It may be the only university in the world to operate not just a nuclear reactor but also a fusion reactor as well.  The institution has base (i.e. operations) funding of slightly over $800 million Canadian, which works out to a ludicrous $80,000 per student.

• Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) (2nd place) has an even more ridiculous 1,300 undergraduates and 2,100 graduates.  Its budget is a slightly smaller $250 million US (still over $60K per student), but it has a $2 billion endowment from its founder, POSCO (a major steel manufacturer in Korea), as well as a heavy tie-up with POSCO for applied research.  (A good history of Postech can be found here).  Again, no Canadian university had those kind of advantages growing up

You get the picture.  It’s a similar deal at Korea’s KAIST and Singapore’s Nanyang (both in the top five).  UC Irvine and UC Santa Cruz are also in the top ten, and while the California system is currently experiencing some problems, these institutes continue to feed off the massive support the UC’s used to receive.  And since the THE rankings heavily privilege money and research intensity, you can see why these kinds of institutions score well ahead of Canadian schools, where implicit rules prevent any institution from reaching these degrees of research-intensity.

But look again at that Australian article I linked to above.  No fewer than 16 Australian universities made the top 100, and the reasons cited for their successes – public funding, stable regulation, English language, other cultural factors – all of these factors exist in Canada.  So why does Australia succeed where Canada doesn’t?

The explanation is actually pretty simple: on average, our universities are substantially older than Australia’s.  Even among the four Canadian schools, two arguably don’t actually meet the “under 50” criteria (Calgary was founded in 1945, though did not become an independent institution until 1966; Concordia dates from 1974, but the two colleges that merged to form it date back to 1896 and 1926, respectively).  Outside of those four, the only Canadian institutions with over 10,000 residential students, founded after 1965, are Lethbridge, Kwantlen, and Fraser Valley (though, depending on how you define “founding date”, presumably you could also make a case for Regina, MacEwan, and Mount Royal).  In Australia, only one-third of universities had degree-granting status before 1965.

The “under-50” designation effectively screens-out most institutions in countries that were early adopters of mass higher education.  The US, for instance, has only seven institutions on the THE list, five of which are in the late-developing West and South, and none of which are in the traditional higher education heartland of the Northeast.  It’s an arbitrary cut-off date, which has expressly been drawn in such a way that puts Asian universities in a better light.  It’s worth keeping that in mind when examining the results.