"It could go either way," says Susan Pfeiffer,

dean of graduate studies at the University of Toronto, which has 5,000 spots in master's programs—and drew more than 22,000 applications this year. "On the one hand, many

of our faculty are favourably disposed toward the sort of attentive undergrad training they would have received [at a small school]," she says. "On the other, in some of our programs, there's a strong emphasis on letters of recommendation. When they come from faculty members who are well-known as researchers, that's favourable. If they're coming from faculty who aren't as well-known, that could work against the students."

Nicholas Kasirer, dean of McGill University's Faculty of Law says: "They very often have a broad, liberal education where they've had excellent contact with professors, smaller classes, and an all-around strong education. It's a double-edged sword coming out of those programs." Students from small schools often miss out on key factors needed for the rigours of graduate work or law school, he says; for example, smaller schools may lack sophisticated laboratory, library and research resources. He says that among grad school applicants, those who do well tend to be mainly from "research-intensive universities such as U of T and McGill."

Students from smaller Atlantic Canada schools make up a slim percentage of McGill's entering law class each year. But that's not to say they don't succeed when they get there, he says, or that it impedes their job prospects.

Employers are "looking for someone who

has a well-rounded CV." The bottom line when landing a job, or going on to further studies, is to show you have gone from one place of excellence to another, and had diverse experiences along the way, he says.

"It might actually be a nice way for someone who has gone to a place that's less well-known, like St. Francis Xavier, which has an excellent reputation in Canada but not so much internationally, [and] marry that with

a school like U of T or McGill, which have excellent international reputations. Suddenly there's a recognizable passport for an international degree."