Even before fee hikes dropped, Montreal a good place to study

We’re No. 10!

Montreal has been ranked the 10th-best city in the world to be a university student, behind the top three of Paris, London and Boston.

So while we may not have the Sorbonne, Oxford or Harvard, we have world-class universities in a city with a good student mix, a good quality of living, decent employer activity and good affordability. So says the 2012 QS World University Rankings, which did its first-ever QS Best Student Cities rankings this year.

Luckily, infrastructure and linguistic peace were not part of the criteria.

Montreal fared much better than any other Canadian city (but we didn’t need QS to tell us that), beating Toronto, which ranked 26th, and Vancouver at 31.

And while we ranked lower than Melbourne, Australia; Vienna; Sydney; Zurich; Berlin; and Dublin, we can also say we rated higher than some pretty amazing cities, namely: Barcelona (11); New York (18); Hong Kong (19); Milan (21); Seoul (23); and Washington, D.C. (30).

To be part of the rankings, each city had to have a population of more than 250,000, and had to be home to at least two ranked institutions. There were 98 cities in the world that qualified.

Student mix looked at the student makeup of a city, both overall and from an international perspective. For quality of living, cities received a score based on the results of the Mercer Quality of Living Survey 2011.

Employer activity looked at domestic and international companies who identified at least one institution in the city as producing excellent graduates. And affordability looked at tuition fees, cost of living and retail pricing.

The QS profile of Montreal says we’re home to the country’s top institution, McGill University (ranked 17th in the world), and that we had one of the highest scores for quality of living, alongside a favourable student mix and rankings score, “largely courtesy of the world-class status of McGill, with Université de Montréal also making the global top 200 and Concordia University the top 600.”

And our tuition for international students compares favourably with those charged at many universities in the U.K., U.S. and Australia, while our cost-ofliving makes us a best-value destination behind Boston and Berlin.