Waterloo first in Canada for employer partnerships

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

The University of Waterloo has been ranked the number one university in Canada for employer partnerships—and number four in the world—according to the 2018 Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Graduate Employability Rankings.

This puts Waterloo in the top 1 percent of universities in the world for employer partnerships.

“With our world-class students and co-op employers, it’s no wonder that we’re number one in the nation for employer partnerships,” says Peggy Jarvie, associate provost, Co-operative and Experiential Education. “The collaboration we have with our outstanding faculty, researchers and industry partners contributes to co-op’s success and delivers an unrivaled form of work-integrated learning that produces some of the world’s most employable alumni.”

In determining the score for employer partnerships, the ranking measured which universities are collaborating successfully with global companies to produce citable, transformative research. Only distinct companies producing three or more collaborative papers in a five-year period (2011-2015) are included in the count. This year’s ranking accounts for university collaborations with 2,000 top global companies, as listed by Fortune and Forbes.

Second, the rankings consider work placement-related partnerships as reported by institutions and validated by the QS research team. Both figures are adjusted to account for the number of faculty at each university, and then combined into a composite index.

The rankings examined 500 universities globally. Overall, Waterloo was ranked 24th in the world for graduate employability. The University of Toronto was the only Canadian school that ranked higher overall (18th place).