Global ‘Young University’ rankings have Oshawa school in top 150 and at #2 in Canada

Ontario Tech University is the second-highest ranked Canadian school in the Times Higher Education Young Universities rankings released this month, with the Oshawa school placing 144 globally of nearly 1,200 universities surveyed.

Ontario Tech trailed only Montreal’s Concordia University (#80) in the rankings, which looked at schools founded in the past 50 years. Concordia was created in 1974, just making the cut, but the school is a merger of Sir George William University (1926) and Loyola College (1896), making its classification as a ‘young’ university tenuous at best.

A news release from Ontario Tech noted the rankings reflected the 21-year-old school’s “strong foundation and well-established tradition of research excellence.”

The Times rankings use 18 different performance indicators to come up with its final list, including research quality and reputation, learning environment, academic citation impact, industry partnerships and international outlook. Ontario Tech, which was founded in 2002 and opened its doors a year later, is one of the youngest universities in the survey.

A major component of the school’s “reputational growth” is its track record for new research grants and awards and industry funding. In 2023-2024, the university attracted more than $25 million in research grants and contracts. Ontario Tech has also built research partnerships and relationships with other young universities named in the rankings, such as eleventh-ranked University of Technology Sydney in Australia.

The Young University accolade comes on the heels of Ontario Tech being named by Research InfoSource as Canada Research University of the Year, among the country’s group of primarily undergraduate universities. At the same time, Ontario Tech’s strength in graduate and postgraduate studies continues to grow, with more 900 students working on master’s degrees or PhDs.

The top ten in the Times rankings was dominated by Asian and French schools, with Nanyang University of Singapore at #1, followed by Paris Science et Lettres of France in second spot. Three Hong Kong schools, three more French universities and colleges in South Korea and the Netherlands rounded out the top ten.

Asia is now home to almost half of the world’s young research universities, according to the Times Higher Education rankings, with the number of Asian universities on the list nearly doubled in the past five years.