Methodology

The Globe Campus NAVIGATOR houses a treasure trove of information!

Although some of it may look simple, like “University XYZ has a B+ for Campus Atmosphere”, a lot of thinking, intelligent assumptions and calculations are behind much of the data displayed in the two main tool sections: Money Finder and Campus Navigator.

It is always wise to understand what the institutions are and what the letters and numbers really mean as much as what they don’t mean. As such, we invite you to invest a few minutes of your time to understand how the institutions are categorized and to do some number crunching with us.

Topics covered:

How We Categorize Institutions

Since education is an area of provincial jurisdiction, and universities in particular are largely independent of government, it is often difficult to find common elements when it pertains to labeling. The Navigator, by and large, includes: Universities, some Colleges and University Colleges.

Other potential labeling you may encounter while doing your research could be: Federated University, Affiliated College or Satellite Campus. Those institutions do not have a profile in the Navigator.

Are there others that are not showing up? Yes! There are some post-secondary facilities that will not be displayed at all within our profiles. These “establishments” represent a mixed bag of private, public and denominational institutions, and sometimes have names and titles that could be misleading. Yorkville University, for instance, is a private for-profit institution that currently offers only a Masters of Arts in Counselling Psychology, largely through distance education, to a relatively small clientele of graduate students.

Focus

Each institution appearing in the Navigator has a classification based on its overall focus:

Student Survey Results Student Survey Results

Our 2012 CUR data is derived from our annual questionnaire sent to over 33,000 undergraduate university students spread among 60 universities in Canada. The questionnaire has around 100 questions and offers somewhat different insights from year to year. It is important to understand that they represent students’ opinions and should not be treated like facts. You may find that student opinions often highlight what facts simply cannot. See “Additional indicators for schools” for a description of facts and figures we have added to further help you make an informed choice.

Sampling & controls

Since it would be difficult – not to mention time consuming – to interview the entire student population of any given university, we rely on a method called sampling that is typically used in survey research. Through sampling, we interview a subset of the student population, but more than enough to get a reliable snapshot of university experience. (The Higher Education Strategy Associates manages the process of determining the minimum number of survey respondents needed, and then administers the survey). A number of strict controls are built into the process to help ensure that those students included in the sample represent Canadian undergraduates.

The letter grades

In the questionnaire, students do not rate their campus experience by choosing a letter from A to D. Rather, students generally rate their experience using a scale from 1 to 9 (for example, where 1 is very dissatisfied and 9 is very satisfied). A mean score (a type of average, the arithmetic mean of a list of numbers, derived from the sum of all the members of the list divided by the number of items in the list) for each university is calculated for each question based on the responses of students who attend that school.

Universities are assigned a letter grade that matches their mean scores — out of a maximum of 5.0 — for each question. The letter grading is based on the following grid:

Under the hood

In the questionnaire, students respond to a broad range of questions that cover different dimensions of the university experience, from quality of teaching and student-faculty interaction to ease of course registration and student services. Moreover, on a single dimension of university experience, students are asked several different questions. For instance, when we ask about “student services”, we ask students to rate everything from academic support and counseling to the campus bookstore and more. These different questions examining a single dimension are then combined together in the analysis phase to create what is called an “index variable,” an aggregate score of all the different questions examining that dimension of the university experience.

We then compare the mean score of the index variable for each university. It was by comparing the distribution of these mean scores that the approach to grading universities (i.e. assigning an A, B, or C) was developed. In short, grades are assigned based upon the mean scores received.

While we survey a large number of students overall (more than 40,000 in 2008), the sample size for an individual university can be small, and when sample sizes are smaller, there may not be statistically significant differences separating universities that receive different letter grades, even though their mean scores are different.

Filtering by Field of Study

Strong participation in the survey allows for further opportunities for analysis, such as filtering the results by Field of Study. When statistically significant, we offer data for each Field of Study of a selected institution. This is quite important since some institutions have specialties or research strengths in faculties and departments that would otherwise be blended within the overall survey results. As such, an institution’s results may be different depending of the Field of Study selected.

Although academic programs differ from institution to institution, we have assigned all of the programs to 7 Fields of Study. You can either select the Field of Study (more general) or program (more specific) you are planning to take. If your program is not listed, choose the Field of Study within which your program might fall. These are:

Averages

Averages are displayed when one looks at a particular school profile. The average is calculated based on the results of all institutions classified within the same “size” category.

For example, if you are looking at the profile of Laurentian University, the average shown next to its own score would be the average score for that question among all the answers received for all the institutions categorized as small (enrolment between 4,000 and 10,000 full-time equivalent students.)

Averages should help you position the school score within what you would find, on average, at other Canadian institutions of similar size.

My Rankings

With this innovative tool, you can choose what is really important to you – the Indicators – and we give you a list of schools that best match your criteria in descending order, meaning the top school matching your criteria is listed first.

How do we rank the schools?

Since these are relative rankings, institutions are grouped into three categories: top tier, middle tier and bottom tier. In each of the categories, we use various data sources to determine the ranking of the institution. Typically, the standard deviation of the data for the criterion is used to group the institutions into the various tiers. Once you have selected the criteria that are most important to you, the Campus Navigator will display the institutions that have the highest ranking according to your preferences. The institutions that have the most top tiers will be displayed at the top.

Additional Indicators For Schools Additional Indicators For Schools

We have added a certain number of indicators throughout each of the school’s profiles. You can identify them with the special symbol shown above.

These indicators are not derived from the student opinion surveys. Rather, they come from a wide range of sources. Many of those sources that are available in the public domain (meaning they are free and accessible to all, and usually are supplied by post-secondary institutions, provincial governments or national data organizations such as Statistics Canada), while others originate with more specialized and less generally accessible sources and data organizations such as Thomson Reuters. The most important point to understand here is that not all statistical information that is either published or available through the internet is reliable. Globe Campus relies on the guidance and experience of the Higher Education Strategy Associates to select and choose the most reliable information and represent it in a consistent and fair manner.

Reference Documents

For those who want the raw calculations and details of where the numbers are coming from, we have created 2 documents: