Ontario veterinary college ranked fourth worldwide

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

by SUSAN MANN

The University of Guelph’s Ontario Veterinary College has placed fourth worldwide in an international ranking of veterinary science schools and is Canada’s highest ranked veterinary school.

But that doesn’t surprise Ontario Veterinary College dean Elizabeth Stone. “Personally, and of course I’m biased, I think that we are one of the top veterinary colleges in the world. It’s really nice for that opinion to be affirmed by an independent group.”

For the college, the fourth-place ranking “gives us bragging rights,” she says, adding “it is an external measure of our value.”

This was the first year the category of veterinary science schools around the world were included in the ranking of universities by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), according to a University of Guelph April 30 press release. Almost 900 universities in various categories were ranked.

The University of California – Davis has the number one ranked veterinary school worldwide, followed by Cornell University in Ithaca, New York and the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College.

For Canadian universities, the Ontario Veterinary College received the highest ranking of any discipline across all of Canada. Only one other university, the University of British Columbia for geography made it into the top 10 rated schools. It was ranked sixth for that program.

After the Ontario Veterinary College, the next highest ranked Canadian veterinary school was the Université de Montréal, which placed 42nd.

The 152-year-old Ontario Veterinary College has about 100 faculty, 480 veterinary students and 250 graduate students, Stone says. It’s the only veterinary school in Ontario and one of five in Canada.

The results for the Ontario Veterinary College will help it recruit faculty and students, Stone says.

In the QS rankings, universities are graded based on academic reputation, employer reputation and research impact. Stone says research impact was measured by assessing how many times papers Ontario Veterinary College faculty members write are cited by other researchers in their work. The college has “faculty that are frequently cited” and are working in areas of, for example, food safety, herd health management, public health and animal welfare.

That’s “a recognition that the research that they’re doing is valued and that it matters,” she notes.

For academic reputation, “our faculty, staff and students have come from all over the world and they are employed at various places,” including government, world animal and other organizations, private companies, and universities, she explains.

The new QS ranking also listed the University of Guelph’s Ontario Agricultural College as 23rd among agricultural schools worldwide. That’s one spot higher than it ranked last year.

Stone has been the Ontario Veterinary College dean for 10 years and is stepping down at the end of June. A new dean hasn’t been named yet. BF