Still among world's top 200 universities

“University ranking season” is beginning, with news that a research centre in China still thinks Waterloo is in the top 200 universities of the world, but not closer to the top 100 than it was last year.

“The 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities was published on Monday, and more rankings are expected in the coming months,” says Jennifer Kieffer of the institutional analysis and planning office, who keeps a close eye on such matters.

The ARWU is a product of the Centre for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. It is, says Kieffer, “an annual ranking of the top 500 universities based on a set of indicators using third-party data including the number of alumni and faculty/ staff who have won Nobel prizes and/or Fields medals, numbers of highly cited researchers, and counts of papers published in Nature and Science, or indexed in the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index.

“ARWU produces an overall ranking of universities (top 500) and also ranks universities in five broad fields and five specific subjects (top 100).”

The envelope, please! “Overall,” says Kieffer, “Waterloo placed in the 151-200 range in the ranking of the top 500 world universities.  (Beyond the top 100 universities are placed into groups in the ranking). This is the same overall ranking we achieved in 2010, which was an improvement from 2009 when we were in the 201-302 range.”

The best university in the world, according to Shanghai, is Harvard, followed by three other American institutions — Stanford, MIT and Berkeley — and then Britain's Cambridge University. The top Canadian universities in the 2011 ranking are Toronto (listed at number 26), the University of British Columbia (37), McGill (64), McMaster (89), Alberta and Montréal (102-150) and Calgary (in the 151-200 list along with Waterloo). Fourteen more institutions —Dalhousie, Laval, Queen’s, Simon Fraser, UWO, Guelph, Manitoba, Ottawa, Saskatchewan, Victoria, Carleton, Québec, Sherbrooke and York — placed in the 201-500 range. Concordia was in the 201-500 list last year but is not in the top 500 this year.

Five broad fields are evaluated in the 2011 rankings, including “Engineering/ Technology and Computer Sciences”, where Waterloo ranked in the 52-75 range along with McGill. Toronto was ranked 21st, and the University of Alberta was ranked in the 76-100 range. Waterloo does not make the top 100 ranking in the other four fields: Social Sciences, Clinical Medicine and Pharmacy, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, or Life and Agricultural Sciences.

Five specific subjects are also evaluated. One is Computer Science, where Waterloo, along with McGill, placed in the 76-100 range. Toronto (10), UBC (29), Alberta and Montreal (both in the 51-75 range) also made the top 100. Waterloo doesn’t appear in the top 100 in the other four fields: Mathematics, Chemistry, Economics/Business, and Physics.

Two other sets of worldwide rankings can be expected in the weeks ahead, prepared by Britain’s Times Higher Education newspaper and by the consulting firm Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd. Also coming this fall will be two sets of rankings for Canadian universities, one prepared by the Globe and Mail newspaper and one — in which Waterloo has been the country’s “best overall” university 17 of the past 19 years — from Maclean’s magazine.

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Yep, those are ice cream bars the front-row folks are clutching. They were participants in a session organized Monday by the graduate studies office for staff and faculty who work with grad students. "Sabrina Hutchison and Ronie Oestreich were on hand from Housing along with Darlene Ryan from the International Student Office," says Marta Bailey of grad studies. "All three provided very valuable information to the captivated crowd." And that's even before the Klondike bars were handed out.

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Provincial cash announced for VeloCity

by Karen Kawawada, communications and public affairs

Waterloo’s startup incubator, VeloCity, will soon be able to help more would-be entrepreneurs bring their ideas to the marketplace, as the program is gaining $1 million in new funding from the province.

John Milloy, the minister of training, colleges and universities, and MPP for Kitchener Centre made the announcement through a news release earlier this week.

“We’re a community that is really making a mark for itself in terms of innovation, and universities are hotbeds of innovation,” Milloy said in an interview. “This is transitioning students and their ideas from what they’re learning in the classroom to actual companies and jobs.”

The money is coming from the Ontario Centres of Excellence, an arm's-length body funded by the province. Wilfrid Laurier University’s Entrepreneurship Accelerator Program is receiving $95,000 in funding from the same source.

While VeloCity won’t be taking any more students into its residence program, because of space limitations in the Minota Hagey Residence that restrict it to 70 students each term, the money will still enable the program to reach more students, said the university's director of student innovation Jesse Rodgers, who manages the centre.

There are plans to physically expand the VeloCity Workspace in downtown Kitchener so it can accommodate up to 20 early-stage startups rather than the current 12, Rodgers said.

There will be more $25,000 grants available to the most promising startups — four grants per term, rather than the current two, at least for the next two years. Both the VeloCity Workspace and the VeloCity Venture Fund grants are open to all students and recent graduates, not just students in the VeloCity “dormcubator.” (Photo: Rodgers, right, presents an award to Maxwell Spear and Andrew Cross of GooseChase, the winning team at VeloCity's end-of-term Exhibition in late July.)

VeloCity aims to connect with more students who are interested in entrepreneurship but aren’t formally involved with the incubator, for instance by hosting talks open to the whole university community, said Rodgers. The goal is to reach 600 students a year rather than the current 200, though exactly how that will be accomplished is “still on the whiteboard.”

Some of the money will go toward increasing the quantity and quality of what’s already on offer — for instance, paying for more legal services to help young companies incorporate, and hosting more events, he said.

Furthermore, VeloCity, which has until now focused on mobile and web applications, is looking at expanding its program to help budding entrepreneurs in fields “outside straight tech-based,” he added.

In a nutshell, the funding means “we can really increase what we’re offering students at the University of Waterloo,” Rodgers said. “We can try out even more things to see how we can best serve students as they work toward an entrepreneurial career path.”

The announcement comes less than five months after 23-year-old VeloCity alumnus and mobile entrepreneur Ted Livingston donated $1 million to VeloCity.

CAR

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