University of Toronto ranks 12th worldwide for employability in 2023 poll
In a recent Times Higher Education ranking, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford top the list, with the University of Toronto leading the Canadian schools.
On November 23, 2023, Timers Higher Education, a post-secondary consultancy, published the Global Employability University Ranking and Survey (GEURS) for 2023 to 2024. The University of Toronto (U of T) ranked 12th place overall and was the first Canadian university on the list among 250 universities worldwide.
Developed using data collected by Emerging, a French human resources consultancy, and Trendence, a German market research company, GEURS used a holistic methodology to select the top 250 universities that exhibit the best graduate employability based on the reports of employers.
First conducted in 2010 and continuing every year since then, GUERS offers insight into the history of the rankings and enables the discovery of trends that reveal the dynamics of the higher education biome. With 40 countries scanned and more than five million ratings collected covering 6,000 institutions, GUERS effectively measures the employability market for institutions, offering valuable information to students, universities, and employers.
The California Institute of Technology leads the pack with the number one spot, along with eight other US universities in the top 20, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Cambridge. According to the polling, US universities occupied a total of 51 spots. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are next in line, with Canada coming in sixth place. This year, eleven Canadian universities are on the list, one more than last year.
U of T is the only Canadian institution in the top 20. In order, the other schools are McGill University, University of British Columbia, University of Montreal, McMaster University, University of Alberta, University of Ottawa, University of Victoria, University of Waterloo, Université du Québec, and Toronto Metropolitan University.
To curate a list that best represents university employability, GEURS follows a specific process that enables their claim to be the only university ranking list that is “exclusively based on employers’ direct assessment.”
As the primary focus of the survey is employability, the main source of information is employers worldwide who have been screened and selected by Emerging to engage in the survey. All respondents are top operational managers who “work with and/or recruit more than five young graduates per year,” and are collectively responsible for over eight million recruitments.
This year’s edition of GUERS used 100,700 votes from employers in 21 countries, each of whom has more than five years of experience and recruits globally. Collectively, the respondents hired 800,000 graduates in the past year. Nearly 70 per cent of participants work in companies with more than 500 employees, 65 per cent have more than 10 years of experience, and 71 per cent recruit and/or supervise more than 10 graduates a year. One thousand universities were considered in the voting stage, which took place from August 16 to September 22, 2023.
More countries are being featured on the list as universities worldwide continue to grow and invest in themselves and their students, whereas countries that once had significant presence are now decreasing in number. Institutions in the US and United Kingdom represented nearly 60 per cent of the list in 2013, but currently only make up 27.5 per cent.
Representing Canada among world-class competitors is not new for U of T, as the institution continually takes top spots in multiple world university rankings and was even declared the most sustainable university for 2024 due to its multiple environment-focused initiatives.
Associate News Editor (Volume 50) — Samuel is a first-year student at UTM working towards an Economics degree. He previously worked with the Federation of Canadian Secondary Students as a writer in the Demystify Tribune and will be continuing his exploration into writing and journalism as an Associate Editor with The Medium. When he's not drawing graphs or outlining essays, Samuel can be found playing the piano and drums, working out, or critiquing film.