34,208 students attend McGill, over four-fifths of whom are Canadian. The university has 21 faculties and professional schools, offering degrees and diplomas in over 300 fields of study, including medicine. The language of instruction is English, although students have the right to submit any graded work in English or in French (except when learning a language is an objective of the course). The university has been recognized for its award-winning research and participates in research organizations both within Canada and in the world. McGill is ranked highly in national, regional, and worldwide rankings, and is sometimes informally described as a Canadian Ivy.
Alumni from McGill have been recognized in fields ranging from the arts and sciences, to business, politics, and sports. Notably, alumni include eight Nobel laureates, three astronauts, two Canadian prime ministers, seven Academy Award winners, several Justices of the Supreme Court of Canada and twenty-five Olympic medalists. A nation-leading 130 students have also won Rhodes Scholarships to pursue studies at the University of Oxford in England.
History
Resting at the foot of Mont Royal, McGill University owes its origins to the vision and philanthropy of James McGill, a wealthy fur trader and merchant who left £10,000 and a 46-acre estate towards the establishment of a college or a university bearing his name.
Founded in 1821, "McGill College" began holding classes on January 27 in 1829 in the merchant's former country house. Four years later, the College awarded a Doctor of Medicine and Surgery to its first graduate, William Leslie Logie. Construction on the Arts Building began in 1839, as the college had quickly outgrown the country house. This iconic structure still anchors the downtown campus today.
Philanthropy continued to shape McGill in the ensuing decades. With the arrival of the charismatic and world-renowned geologist, Sir William Dawson, Principal from 1855-1893, McGill grew in both size and prestige. Under his leadership, the great benefactors of the day—Lord Strathcona, Sir William Macdonald, William Molson and Peter Redpath—supported a major expansion of campus, which included the construction of more than ten new buildings. In 1885, the name McGill University was formally adopted by the college's Board of Governors.
With investment came innovation and progress. Lord Strathcona established a special fund for the education of women which led to the admission of McGill's first female students in 1884. One graduate, Carrie Derick, BA1890, was the first woman to become a professor in Canada, teaching botany at McGill. Large gifts from Sir William Macdonald around the turn of the century allowed McGill to add a second campus in Ste Anne de Bellevue and attract professors such as Ernest Rutherford, whose Nobel Prize-winning research on the nature of the radioactivity began a long tradition of McGill innovation, which has included the invention of the world's first artificial cell and Plexiglas.
McGill's reputation for excellence continued to grow as the post-war years dramatically transformed the University. The influx of returning soldiers, and then the Baby Boom generation tripled McGill's enrolment. The shift from a purely private institution to a publicly funded one opened its doors to more students. At the same time, the campus grew, with modern concrete and glass structures springing up alongside McGill's older stone buildings.
Today McGill University is recognized as one of Canada's top research-intensive universities. In 2003, Heather Munroe-Blum became McGill's 16th Principal. Under her leadership, McGill has solidified its reputation as one of the top universities in the world, excelling in the quality of its research, education and service to the community.
Research
Research plays a critical role at McGill. According to the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, "Researchers at McGill are affiliated with about 75 major research centres and networks, and are engaged in an extensive array of research partnerships with other universities, government and industry in Quebec and Canada, throughout North America and in dozens of other countries." Annually, around 100 inventions take place at McGill. In recognition of its research quality, McGill is affiliated with eight Nobel Laureates and professors have won major teaching prizes.
Since 1926, McGill has been a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization of research-intensive universities in North America. McGill is also a founding member of Universitas 21, an international association of research-driven universities. McGill is a member of the G13, 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.
McGill is perhaps best recognized for its research and discoveries in the health sciences. William Osler, Wilder Penfield, Donald Hebb, Brenda Milner, and others made significant discoveries in medicine, neuroscience and psychology while working at McGill. The Montreal Neurological Institute is also located in McGill university, where many of these individuals worked. The first hormone governing the Immune System (later christened the Cyrokine 'Interleukin-2') was discovered at McGill in 1965 by Gordon & McLean. The invention of the world's first artificial cell was made by Thomas Chang, 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.
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.
Campus
McGill's main campus is set upon 32 hectares (80 acres) at the foot of Mount Royal in Downtown Montreal. A second campus, Macdonald Campus, is situated on 6.5 square kilometres (1,600 acres) of fields and forested land in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, 30 kilometres west of the downtown campus.
Academic Reputation
McGill is one of Canada's top-ranked universities among those offering medical and doctoral degrees, ranking first in Canada for the fourth consecutive year in the Maclean's 18th annual University Rankings issue. The university has held first place in student awards for nine consecutive years, and consistently ranks first for reputation, average size, and number of social sciences and humanities grants per full-time faculty.
In addition, Maclean's ranked McGill's law school second overall for two consecutive years. In particular, McGill's law school, which requires reading knowledge of French and offers the joint B.C.L./LL.B. degree in both civil law and common law, ranked first by supreme court clerkships, second by elite firm hiring, third by faculty hiring, fourth by faculty journal citations, and eight by national reach.
In the Times Higher Education (THE) - QS World University Rankings 2008, McGill University was ranked the best university in Canada, the second-best public university and 14th overall in North America, and 20th in the world. Within specific fields, McGill ranked 10th in the life sciences and biomedicine, 13th in the arts and humanities, 14th in the social sciences, 22nd in the natural sciences, and 18th in technology. When McGill placed 12th overall in the 2007 ranking, the achievement has been regarded as the "highest rank to be reached by a Canadian institution.". In Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities 2008, McGill ranked third in Canada, 42nd in the Americas, and 60th in the world. In its 2006 ranking of global universities, Newsweek ranked McGill third in Canada, 30th in North America, and 42nd worldwide. 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-.
The Financial Times' global MBA ranking placed McGill's business school, the Desautels Faculty of Management, 44th in the world in 2006 and 96th in 2008, for a three year average rank of 77. Notably, the ranking placed it 33rd and 31st 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%. During the same year, The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked the business school 100th in the world, and in particular, 15th in the world for breadth of alumni network.
The Globe and Mail's Canadian University Report awarded McGill top marks in its 2008 annual university survey. McGill received an A+ for Academic Reputation, the highest score of any large, medium, or small sized University. Additionally the school received an A- for: most satisfied students, quality of education, extracurricular activities, recreation and athletics, and campus atmosphere; as well as A's in both library services and campus technology. The Canadian University Report awarded McGill's downtown campus a D for its 'on-campus' food services and a C for its on-campus pub Gerts.
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, after the University of Toronto. 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.
In October 2008, McGill University was named one of "Canada's Top 100 Employers" by Mediacorp Canada Inc., and was featured in Maclean's newsmagazine.
Faculties and Schools
Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
Faculty of Arts
Centre for Continuing Education
Continuing Education site
Faculty of Dentistry
Faculty of Education
Faculty of Engineering
Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies
Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies site
Faculty of Law
Desautels Faculty of Management
Faculty of Medicine
Schulich School of Music
Faculty of Religious Studies
Faculty of Science
McGill University was ranked 20th in the 2008 THES-QS World University Ranking
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