Maclean's University Survey Failing

I just started my first week at my new school, the University of New Brunswick, and I was e-mailed a message that UNB is following many other schools in pulling out of the annual Maclean's university survey. The survey is a tool that has been used to rank Canadian universities for years, and is (was?) fairly well regarded by potential students. This has changed with the large scale university pullout - the school's main beefs are that the rankings are general for the entire school, instead of focusing on faculty, and inaccuracies in statistics gathering (small sample sizes for instance). Generalizing would work better in America, but in Canada you tend to apply more to the faculty more than you apply to the school (my acceptance letters all read along the lines of "The faculty of Computer Science is pleased to welcome you to [insert school here]), leading to an inaccurate picture of the school. These schools are not just angry at being low on the lists either. The University of Toronto, one of the first to withdraw, was ranked first in its category in last year's survey. (Interestingly, Maclean's still has links to the university ranking pages on its homepage)

Roughly half of the universities included in the last survey have withdrawn, listed here with their rankings (by number of schools in their classification - eg. 3/11 for the third ranked school of eleven - there are some ties) in the last survey: University of Toronto (1/15), McMaster University (11/15), University of Ottawa (12/15), University of British Columbia (4/15), Simon Fraser University (3/11), University of Alberta (6/15), University of Calgary (14/15), University of Lethbridge (13/21), University of Manitoba (15/15), l'Universiti de Montrial (7/15), Dalhousie University (13/15), Brandon University (16/21), Brock University (14/21), Laurentian University (19/21), l'Universiti de Moncton (15/21), Trent University (8/21), Carleton University (8/11), Concordia University (8/11), Queen's University (5/15), University of Windsor (11/11), York University (10/11), University of Western Ontario (not sure), and University of New Brunswick (7/11).