Rankings of universities in the United Kingdom Information

Three national rankings of universities in the United Kingdom are published annually – by The Complete University Guide, The Guardian and jointly by The Times and The Sunday Times. Rankings have also been produced in the past by The Daily Telegraph and Financial Times.

The primary aim of the rankings is to inform potential undergraduate applicants about UK universities based on a range of criteria, including entry standards, student satisfaction, staff/student ratio, academic services and facilities expenditure per student, research quality, proportion of Firsts and 2:1s, completion rates and student destinations. All of the league tables also rank universities on their strength in individual subjects.

Each year since 2008, Times Higher Education has compiled a "Table of Tables" to combine the results of the 3 mainstream league tables. In the 2019 table, the top 5 universities were the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of St Andrews, Imperial College London and Loughborough University.

The following rankings of British universities are produced annually:

The Complete University Guide is compiled by Mayfield University Consultants and was published for the first time in 2007.

The ranking uses ten criteria, with a statistical technique called the Z-transformation applied to the results of each. The ten Z-scores are then weighted (by 1.5 for student satisfaction, 0.5 for research intensity, academic services spend and facilities spend, and 1.0 for the rest) and summed to give a total score for each university. These total scores are then transformed to a scale where the top score is set at 1,000, with the remainder being a proportion of the top score. The ten criteria are:

The most recent league table (2020) ranked the top 50 (out of 131) British universities as follows:

On an annual basis, The Complete University Guide also produces an individual ranking for British universities across 70 subjects. The Guide includes a summary table ranking universities according to how frequently they appear in the top ten of each subject ranking.

The most recent league table (2020) ranked the top 10 (out of 61) British universities as follows:

The Guardians ranking uses eight different criteria, each weighted between 5 and 17 per cent. Unlike other annual rankings of British universities, the criteria do not include a measure of research output. A "value-added" factor is included which compares students degree results with their entry qualifications, described by the newspaper as being "[b]ased upon a sophisticated indexing methodology that tracks students from enrolment to graduation, qualifications upon entry are compared with the award that a student receives at the end of their studies". Tables are drawn up for subjects, with the overall ranking being based on an average across the subjects rather than on institutional level statistics. The eight criteria are:

The most recent league table (2020) ranked the top 50 (out of 121) British universities as follows:

The Times/The Sunday Times university league table, known as the Good University Guide, is published in both electronic and print format and ranks institutions using the following eight criteria:

Other criteria considered are:

The following universities rank in the top 10 in at least one of the most recent national rankings; the table is ordered according to the Times Higher Education Table of Tables (2019):

Notes:a Number of times the university is ranked within the top 10 of one of the three national rankings. b The university is ranked within the top 5 of all three national rankings. c The university is ranked within the top 3 of all three national rankings.

It has been commented by The Sunday Times that a number of universities which regularly feature in the top ten of British university league tables, such as St Andrews, Durham and LSE (in the case of LSE 3rd to 13th nationally whilst only 327th in the US News and World Report Rankings / 35th in the QS Rankings / 23rd in the THE Rankings), "inhabit surprisingly low ranks in the worldwide tables", whilst other universities such as Manchester, Edinburgh and KCL "that failed to do well in the domestic rankings have shone much brighter on the international stage". The considerable disparity in rankings has been attributed to the different methodology and purpose of global university rankings such as the Academic Ranking of World Universities, QS World University Rankings and Times Higher Education World University Rankings. International university rankings primarily use criteria such as academic and employer surveys, the number of citations per faculty, the proportion of international staff and students and faculty and alumni prize winners. When size is taken into account, LSE ranks second in the world out of all small to medium-sized specialist institutions (after ENS Paris) and St Andrews ranks second in the world out of all small to medium-sized fully comprehensive universities (after Brown University) using metrics from the QS Intelligence Unit in 2015. The national rankings, on the other hand, give most weighting to the undergraduate student experience, taking account of teaching quality and learning resources, together with the quality of a universitys intake, employment prospects, research quality and drop-out rates.

The disparity between national and international league tables has caused some institutions to offer public explanations for the difference. LSE for example states on its website that we remain concerned that all of the global rankings – by some way the most important for us, given our highly international orientation – suffer from inbuilt biases in favour of large multi-faculty universities with full STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) offerings, and against small, specialist, mainly non-STEM universities such as LSE.

Research by the UKs Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) in 2016 found that global rankings fundamentally measure research performance, with research-related measures accounting for over 85 percent of the weighting for both the Times Higher Education and QS rankings and 100 percent of the weighting for the ARWU ranking. HEPI also found that ARWU made no correction for the size of an institution. There were also concerns about the data quality and the reliability of reputation surveys. National rankings, while said to be "of varying validity", have more robust data and are "more highly regarded than international rankings".

The following universities rank in the top 100 of at least two global rankings:

Notes:a Number of times the university is ranked within the top 100 of one of the four global rankings. b The university is ranked within the top 50 of all four global rankings. c The university is ranked within the top 25 of all four global rankings.

Complete article available at this page.