“Waterloo is different,” Mr. Woods said, sitting in a scaled-down version of Google’s Silicon Valley office, down to a gourmet, no-charge cafeteria. “It’s got this amazing university which has long been one of our top three recruiting universities for Google as a whole, worldwide,” said Mr. Woods, who earned a doctorate at Waterloo.

Image Ivan Lukianchuk, a graduate of the University of Waterloo, started a gaming site. As a student, he worked for BlackBerry. Credit... Ian Willms for The New York Times

“Waterloo grads do well at Google, they do very well.”

The University of Waterloo did not achieve its exalted status by being venerable. It received its first students, who were initially taught in temporary buildings plopped into a corn field north of town, only in 1957.

Nor did it buy its way to the top. Its alumni, particularly Mr. Lazaridis, the former co-chief executive and current vice chairman of BlackBerry, have been generous, with $121 million in personal donations to date. Mr. Lazaridis, who also donated $150 million to establish an independent school of theoretical physics in Waterloo, developed what became Research in Motion’s first product while still an undergraduate student, and dropped out weeks before finishing his studies to found the company in 1984.

But like most universities in Canada, Waterloo is a public institution with relatively low tuition subsidized by Canadian taxpayers. In 2011, the federal and provincial governments provided $243 million, or 42 percent, of its operating budget. Its endowment is only $261 million, a fraction of the $16.5 billion Stanford holds or the $10.3 billion of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, two of America’s top engineering universities.

Different approaches, rather than money, have instead enabled it to attract prominent faculty members from around the world as well as Canada’s top engineering and computer science students.

Unusually for a college or university in North America, Waterloo does not require its faculty or students to give it any ownership stake in products or inventions they create there. For faculty members, control of that intellectual property can potentially be far more valuable than any university salary.