Recently, provincial premiers have taken to talking up the need to improve post-secondary education in Canada. One phrase which has taken particular hold is that of developing “world-class” universities. But what exactly does this mean? What does a world-class university look like and what policies would be required to create them in Canada?
Being world-class is fundamentally a matter of prestige and reputation. Because research is distributed worldwide through disciplinary journals that are read by every serious scholar in the field, a good researcher can be known around the world. While it is possible to gain a reputation for teaching at the undergraduate level, that reputation will always be local; there isn't even a national reputation to be gained from top-flight teaching, let alone global.
That is why world-class universities are those institutions that manage to attract toptier researchers, who in turn attract high-quality graduate students. This doesn't mean that world-class institutions do not do any good undergraduate teaching — they frequently do. But it is often done by graduate students, and to the extent it is done by professors themselves it is incidental to their main job of producing high-quality research and running graduate seminars.
World-class, then, means large, expensive, research-intensive institutions. That rules out the majority of Canada's universities: There are really only about 20 institutions that have the required size to even be considered as having world-class status. This does not mean there are no world-class academics in other institutions, just that they do not collectively have the resources to make their institution world-class.
Even the best institutions are rarely among the best at everything. Most institutions are known for their strengths in particular areas (e.g. physical sciences, health sciences or social sciences). Canada has maybe eight universities that are genuinely world-class (meaning that they are incontrovertibly in the top 100 universities globally) in at least one field. Four of these are in Ontario, two in Quebec and one each in Alberta and British Columbia. Of these, only four institutions — McGill University, University of Montreal, University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia — have any genuine claim to being world-class in more than one broad field of study, and a fifth, the University of Toronto, is the only institution which is genuinely world-class across a wide range of fields.
This may sound like a harsh judgment on Canadian universities, but it is not; in fact, compared to other countries our size we do extraordinarily well at producing quality universities. Where Canada has five institutions that produce large amounts of research across a broad range of fields, Australia has only three and Italy has but a single institution.
Creating and sustaining a world-class university is an immensely expensive exercise. Laboratories do not come cheap, and neither do good libraries. Moreover, top researchers are extremely footloose, following high salaries, engaging colleagues, and challenging graduate students from one congenial appointment to another. Indeed, of all the countries in the world, only the United States is able to support more than a dozen of these kinds of universities.
How do the Americans do it? Money, of course. The U.S. spends a tremendous amount of money on its research universities. Much of it comes from public investing in basic science and research, and big American research universities receive considerably more funding than their Canadian equivalents. This comes at the expense of equality, and second and third-tier American institutions are probably not as well funded as their Canadian equivalents. So it is in part an issue of priorities — Americans are currently diverting more of their funding for purposes of “excellence.”
It's also a matter of tuition fees, since large U.S. research institutions typically charge higher fees than their Canadian counterparts. Fortunately, most of them also have extremely generous need-based student aid packages for undergraduates from lower-income backgrounds.
