New Rankings Of The World's Best Universities Are Out & UofT Beat McGill In Every Subject

New rankings of the world's best universities by subject shut Canada out of the top 10 in every category. And there's even worse news for Montreal: McGill University ranks lower than the University of Toronto (UofT) on all metrics.

The rankings come from QS Quacquarelli Symonds, a firm that specializes in higher education news and analyses.

The subject rankings evaluate the quality and reputation of universities' arts and humanities, engineering and technology, life sciences and medicine, and natural sciences programs.

Globally, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge dominate the top spots in each ranking. The only other school to crack the top three in any subject is Johns Hopkins University, on the life sciences and medicine list.

In Canada, UofT comes first in arts and humanities (15th globally), engineering and technology (27th), and life sciences and medicine (13th). Only in natural sciences does another school, the University of British Columbia (UBC), take the national top spot (17th globally).

Those two schools, and McGill, rank in the national top three in all subjects, except engineering and technology where the University of Waterloo comes in third, pushing McGill to fourth place.

McGill ranks 36th overall in arts and humanities, 26th in life sciences and medicine, and 41st in both and natural sciences and engineering and technology.

In all subjects, the top schools nationally far outrank other Canadian entries in the global list. The Université de Montréal ranks fourth nationally in arts and humanities but 148th globally. The University of Alberta claims the Canadian fifth place in engineering and technology but 93rd overall. McMaster University places fourth nationally and 48th globally in life sciences and medicine. And the University of Waterloo is fourth in Canada and 74th globally in natural sciences.

The QS World University Rankings by Subject weigh "academic and employer reputation" (using a survey of 151,000 academics and 99,000 employers), "research citations per paper," the H-index (a measure of the "impact of an author's scholarly output and performance" per Washington University), and schools' "international research network."

QS says it considered 15,700 university programs at 1,594 universities in 93 countries.