Region : Quebec
City : Montreal
Web site : www.mcgill.ca
McGill University is a public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, ranked among the world's top 30 institutions. It was established in 1821 by royal charter, issued by King George IV of Great Britain. The University bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Scotland whose bequest in 1813 formed the university's precursor, McGill College.
McGill's main campus is set at the foot of Mount Royal in Downtown Montreal, with the second campus situated near fields and forested lands in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, also on the Montreal Island, 30 kilometres (18 miles) west of the main campus. Its academic units are organized into 11 main Faculties and Schools. The University is one of two members of the Association of American Universities located outside the United States, and it is the only Canadian member of the Global University Leaders Forum (GULF), within the World Economic Forum, which is made up of 26 of the world's top universities.
McGill offers degrees and diplomas in over 300 fields of study, with the highest average admission requirements of any Canadian university. Most students are enrolled in the five largest faculties, namely Arts, Science, Medicine, Engineering, and Management. Tuition fees vary significantly between in-province, out-of-province, and international students, as well as between faculties. Scholarships are generous, yet highly competitive and relatively difficult to attain, compared to other institutions of higher learning in the country.
McGill counts among its alumni 12 Nobel laureates and 141 Rhodes Scholars, both the most in the country, as well as three astronauts, three Canadian prime ministers, thirteen justices of the Canadian Supreme Court, four foreign leaders, 28 foreign ambassadors, nine Academy Award winners, eleven Grammy Award winners, three Pulitzer Prize winners, and 28 Olympic medalists, all of varying nationalities. Throughout its long history, McGill alumni were instrumental in inventing or initially organizing football, basketball, and ice hockey. McGill University or its alumni also founded several major universities and colleges, including the Universities of British Columbia, Victoria, and Alberta, the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Dawson College.
In the 2007-2008 school year, McGill offered over 340 academic programs in eleven faculties. The university also offers over 250 doctoral and master's graduate degree programs. Despite strong increases in university enrollment across North America, McGill has upheld a relatively low and appealing student-faculty ratio of 16:1. There are nearly 1,600 tenured or tenure-track professors teaching at the university.
Tuition fees vary significantly between in-province, out-of-province, and international students, with full-time Quebec students paying around $4,014.82 per year, Canadian students from other provinces paying around $8,799.82 per year, and international students paying $18,267.22-$41,815.92 per year. Students must also pay housing costs, though Montreal has some of the least expensive housing among large North American cities.
Since 1996, McGill, in accordance with the Quebec Ministry of Education, Recreation and Sports (Ministère de l'Éducation, du Loisir et du Sport or MELS), has had eight categories that qualifies certain international students to be excused from paying international fees. These categories include: students from France, a quota of students from select countries which have agreements with MELS, which include Algeria, China, and Morocco, students holding diplomatic status, including their dependents, and students enrolled in certain language programs leading to a degree in French. In the school year 2008-2009, McGill's graduate business program became funded by tuition, and was the last business school in Canada to do so.
Scholarships at McGill are relatively difficult to attain, compared to other Canadian universities. For out-of-province first year undergraduate students, a high school average of 95% is required to receive a guaranteed one-year entrance scholarship. To be considered for the same scholarships, Quebec CEGEP students need a minimum R-score of 35.5, United States high school students need a minimum A average as well as at least 700 in each SAT or 33 in the ACT, and French Baccalaureate students need an average of 15.5 plus a minimum score of 14 in each course; similarly, students in the British education system need As in both GCSE Level and predicted Advanced Level results, and International Baccalaureate students need to attain a minimum overall average of 6.9 on predicted grades or a score of 42 on exam results. In general, entrance scholarship recipients rank in the top 1-2% of their class.
For renewal of previously earned scholarships, students generally need to be within the top 10% of their faculty. For in-course scholarships in particular, students must be within the top 5% of their faculty. McGill itself outlines scholarship considerations as follows: "Competition for basic and major scholarships is intense at McGill. An extraordinary number of exceptional applications are received each year and therefore we cannot award scholarships to all good candidates."
The university has joined Project Hero, a scholarship program cofounded by General (Ret'd) Rick Hillier for the families of fallen Canadian Forces members. McGill is also partnered with the STEM initiative Schulich Leader Scholarships, awarding an $80,000 scholarship to an incoming engineering student and a $60,000 scholarship to a student pursuing a degree in science/technology/mathematics each year.
As of the 2015-2016 school year, McGill was ranked 1st in Canada among all its major/research universities in the Maclean's 24th annual rankings, maintaining this position for the 12th consecutive year.
Internationally, McGill ranked 30th in the world and 1st in Canada in the 2016 QS World University Rankings. It was ranked 42nd in the world by the 2016-2017 Times Higher Education World University Rankings and 63rd in the world by the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) 2016. Times Higher Education also ranked McGill 18th in the world in its 2016 Global Employability University Rankings. In the 2011 Emerging/Trendence Global Employability Ranking, McGill was ranked the 19th finest in the world, and 1st in Canada, for popularity among major employers. In the 2008 College Prowler Online rankings for Academics at North American universities, McGill earned an A- for Academics; making it the only Canadian school to achieve a grade above a B-.
McGill is one of 26 members of the prestigious Global University Leaders Forum (GULF), which acts as an intellectual community within the World Economic Forum to advise its leadership on matters relating to higher education and research. It is the only Canadian university member of GULF.
Since Maclean's began ranking Canadian law schools in 2007, it has placed McGill's law school second overall for the second year in a row. In particular, McGill's law school ranked first by supreme court clerkships, second by elite firm hiring, third by faculty hiring, fourth by faculty journal citations, and eighth by national reach.
The Globe and Mail's Canadian University Report awarded McGill top marks in its 2013 annual university survey. McGill received an A+ for Employer Reputation, the highest score of any large, medium, or small sized University. Additionally the school received an A for campus technology and city satisfaction.
LinkedIn ranked McGill #1 for accounting professionals, #2 for investment bankers, and #3 for software developers within Canada.
In 2009, Forbes ranked McGill's business school, the Desautels Faculty of Management, 11th in the world among non-U.S. universities for its two-year MBA program. The Eduniversal Ranking placed the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University first in Canada and 8th in the world among business schools. The Financial Times, in its global MBA ranking, placed Desautels 84th in the world in 2014 and 76th in 2013. The ranking placed it 55th and 43rd worldwide in the value for money and alumni recommended categories respectively. In BusinessWeek's Best International B-Schools Of 2008, Desautels was ranked among the top 16 international business schools, ranking fourth in intellectual capital with a selectivity of 32%.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek's 2012 Business Schools Ranking ranked McGill's Desautels Faculty of Management 10th in the world among non-US business schools, referring to McGill University as "the #1 university in Canada and among the top 20 worldwide."
Research Infosource named McGill "Research University of the Year" in its 2003 and 2005 rankings of Canada's Top 50 Research Universities. In 2007, Research Infosource ranked McGill the second-best research university in the country. They also ranked McGill University third in Canada in research-intensity and fourth in total-research funding,finding that McGill ranks in the top five universities in terms of research dollars per full-time faculty member and number of refereed publications per full-time faculty member. The study showed that research funding represents approximately $259,100 per faculty member, the fourth highest in the country.
McGill was named one of "Canada's Top 100 Employers" in October 2008 and October 2009.
The Sustainable Endowments Institute gave McGill a grade of "B" on the 2009 College Sustainability Report Card for its improvements in on-campus environmental sustainability, with only 34 schools earning higher grade.
Since 1926, McGill has been a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization of leading research universities in North America. McGill is a founding member of Universitas 21, an international network of leading research-intensive universities that work together to expand their global reach and advance their plans for internationalization. McGill is one of 26 members of the prestigious Global University Leaders Forum (GULF), which acts as an intellectual community within the World Economic Forum to advise its leadership on matters relating to higher education and research. It is the only Canadian university member of GULF. McGill is also a member of the U15, a group of prominent research universities within Canada.
McGill-Queen's University Press began as McGill in 1963 and amalgamated with Queen's in 1969. McGill-Queen's University Press focuses on Canadian studies and publishes the Canadian Public Administration Series.
The invention of the world's first artificial cell was made by Thomas Chang while an undergraduate student at the university.While chair of physics at McGill, nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford performed the experiment that led to the discovery of the alpha particle and its function in radioactive decay, which won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. Alumnus Jack W. Szostak was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.
William Chalmers invented Plexiglas while a graduate student at McGill. In computing, MUSIC/SP, software for mainframes once popular among universities and colleges around the world, was developed at McGill. A team also contributed to the development of Archie, a pre-WWW search engine. A 3270 terminal emulator developed at McGill was commercialized and later sold to Hummingbird Software. A team has developed digital musical instruments in the form of prosthesis, called Musical Prostheses.
McGill offers bachelor's, master's and doctoral programs in the following faculties:
There are also :
McGill, with the university, Of British Columbia, is one of two Canadian universities, Members of Universitas 21, a network of universities focused on research.
Sources : Wikipedia, www.mcgill.ca
