Known as the ‘Maple League’, the four universities promote the advantage they have over big-city schools: an intimate undergraduate experience

Acadia University was recently highlighted in an article in Maclean's magazine focused on the success of the newly-formed Maple League of Universities. The following is an excerpt:

Small liberal arts undergraduate universities are outliers in Canadian higher education, but harbour big ambitions to be its future.

Four of them—Bishop’s University, Acadia University, Mount Allison University and St. Francis Xavier University—joined forces last year as the “Maple League” to raise their profile as an alternative to the “bigger is better” model that dominates undergraduate education in Canada.

“Students rank our schools very highly on student satisfaction but most Canadians don’t know about this model of education,” says Michael Goldbloom, president of Bishop’s and steering committee chairman of the Maple League (a snappier version of the original “U4” partnership begun three years ago). All with fewer than 4,500 students, the schools have started collaborating on course offerings, recruitment and other projects to promote an intimate academic experience at some of the oldest and, by choice, smallest institutions in the country.

History professor James Sedgwick teaches a class at Acadia University as students from St. Francis Xavier follow along via satellite in Wolfville, N.S. on Tuesday, January 31, 2017. (Photograph by Darren Calabrese)

Continue reading the Maclean's article, Why a group of small universities believes the future is theirs

Learn more about the Maple League of Universities.