University of Toronto #1 Canadian school for international students; McMaster (Hamilton), Ontario Tech (Oshawa) also make list

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Published January 26, 2024 at 8:36 pm

With new regulations being put in place to limit the number of international students at Canadian post-secondary institutions, it seems appropriate to cite a recent Times Higher Education study on the most international universities in the world, which has Canadian schools – with the exception of the University of Toronto – far down the list when squared up against their global competition.

Oxford University in England came out on top in the rankings, with 42 per cent of its 21,750 full-time students arriving from outside the country. Toronto was the only Canadian school in the top 100 in the world, sliding in to 21st place with 25.8 per cent of its 79,292 students internationally based.

McMaster University in Hamilton was ranked 103 in the world, second in Ontario and fourth in Canada with 30.9 per cent of its 28,254 full-time students coming from outside Canada.

Toronto’s two other universities – York and Toronto Metropolitan – also made the list, as did Ontario Tech of Oshawa, which earned a ranking from 601-800. The small and relatively young university has just eight per cent of its 9,449 students coming from outside the country.

The school did rank very high – tops in Canada, in fact – in a research-based criteria.

Other Ontario schools in the top 200 in the world include Waterloo (158), and Ottawa (177), with Western, Queens, York and Guelph cracking the top 500.

Oxford topped the ranking for the eighth year in a row, followed by U.S. schools Stanford, MIT and Harvard, with Cambridge (England) in fifth.

The highest new entry is Italy’s Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, ranked in the 301-350 bracket. However, the majority of the institutions joining the ranking for the first time this year are in Asia.

The rankings are based on 18 performance indicators that measure an institution’s performance across five areas: teaching, research environment, research quality, industry, and international outlook.

This year’s ranking analyzed more than 134 million citations across 16.5 million research publications and included survey responses from 68,402 scholars around the globe.

There are more than6.4 million international students globally, up from two million in 2000, with the majority  enrolled in educational in high-income countries.

View the World University Rankings 2024 methodology

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