University of Manitoba

MacLean’s does not rate Manitoba highly.
Bear in mind, Manitoba is financially a so-​so province, and the winter weather is a big turnoff. These two factors in combination don’t help in the «reputation» part of the survey. It’s not exactly a huge surprise that better weather locations such as Simon Fraser and U. Victoria generally rank high in the comprehensive rankings.
And ranking faculty based in large part on awards won (which MacLean’s does, and it is a heavily weighted factor), not sure about that. Those tenured profs who are good at winning awards often times are lousy lecturers, and are inclined to delegate part of their lecture duties, as well as paper grading duties, to grad students. So the benefit students get from having award winners on staff can be dubious.
To be fair, though, professors who have a choice among job offers, will often choose a city with a better winter, and/​or that is more cosmopolitan.
Though some of my profs liked the house you can get for your money in the ‘peg, and actually chose Manitoba over opportunities in Alberta, Ontario and BC. So your profs are not purely gonna be those who couldn’t get a job in Vancouver. Canada’s winter is Canada’s winter, everywhere but southern BC, its gonna happen. Sometimes we make too big a deal out of –22 versus –14 (though when you are standing at a bus stop — which you might do as a student — it does matter some).
The experience I had at U of M was a very good one. I’ll say what anybody with wisdom says about university — what you get out of it depends a lot on what you put into it. Self-​motivation goes a long way. The particular name of the school matters less than you might think (as long as we’re not talking a community college or technical institute). If you’re actually there to study hard, get good grades and a degree to help you with the rest of your life, and do it in a city large enough to have some semblance of culture so you can have at least some fun along they way, U of M is a legit option.
In my work life, I’ve never felt like the profs forgot to teach me the core things I needed to know to succeed in my profession.

Despite the MacLeans rankings I think this is actually a good place to learn. I took a Bachelor of Arts and M.F.A. here and I found that, on average, the professors were very knowledgable and the resources were more than adequate.