University rankings and league tables: just how useful are they?
You will probably be familiar with the concept of university league tables: they are rankings of universities, listed from best to worst, published so that you can easily identify the top universities in the country, and in the world - right?
Well, let's see…
In the UK, there are several well known rankings, all compiled slightly differently, by different organisations. And worldwide, there are several more. They are published annually, typically a year ahead of time; so for example, the 2024 guides were published in 2023.
The stated aim of each of the national league tables is to help prospective students make the right choice about their university courses. Each comes with an overall ranking of institutions, some editorial guidance, and then rankings by subject. International league tables are a little less clear on their aims; only the QS ranking clearly states that its aim is to help students make decisions.
Whether you find these useful in your choice will be very much for you to decide, but in order that you make your decisions with your eyes wide open, I want to tell you a little more about the tables; how they are viewed by people in the sector, what’s in them and what they might actually tell you that’s relevant to your choice.
Armed with this information, you’ll be able to understand some of their strengths, their limitations, and work out just how useful they are for you.
Who actually cares about league tables?
Let’s start with one absolute certainty. Most university-based advisers will tell you they don’t like league tables. They will say that at best they are unhelpful, as they don’t reflect what is important to each individual. At worst, they will describe rankings as inaccurate and downright misleading. I honestly think that when they say this, they genuinely mean it, as they believe that for you, basing your decision purely on a league table is a bad idea.
They will stick with this position, right up until the moment their university does well in a ranking. Then these very same people will be the first to point out that their university is top in the region for student satisfaction, has been in the overall top ten for the past five years, or is best in the UK for employability - or whatever is the most favourable part of the ranking for them.
I know this, because I’ve done it. I’ve done Open Day talks containing excerpts from league tables, and have put top 10 rankings in prospectuses, on websites and on banners. Is it hypocritical? Well, maybe a little, but every organisation wants to show itself in the best light, and they will argue that it is up to you to decide whether that particular measure is relevant to your choice.
Another certainly is that your teachers and advisers in schools will do pretty much the same thing. They don’t want you to make your individual decision based on a league table; they want you to be more sophisticated than that, and they genuinely want you to find a place that suits your particular personality and strengths.
They will be pleased for you wherever you go, but you can be sure that they will be particularly proud if you make it into a highly ranked university. That’s because very often school-based advisers will be judged themselves on how many students they can get into ‘top’ universities; having to report on student destinations that will then be used on the school website, on the school profile, and in parent presentations.
And a third certainty is that rankings do matter to universities. Both the press and the government regard league tables as a way to hold universities to account, and most universities will want to maximise their league positions, seeing them as critical for their reputation and status.
UK University League Tables
In the UK, there are three leading league tables:
The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide (paying subscribers only).
The Guardian University Guide (freely available).
The Complete University Guide (owned by IDP Connect, but editorially independent and freely available).
Each of these UK rankings includes the following in their criteria:
Entry standards
Student satisfaction (from the National Student Survey)
Staff/student ratios
Completion rate
Career prospects (after 15 months - from the Destination of Leavers from HE Survey)
To this mix, each table adds some extra factors.
The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide adds Degree class outcomes (how many graduates get First and Upper-second class degrees) and Research quality (as measured by the Research Assessment Exercise).
The Guardian adds Value added (basically comparing the Degree class outcomes with the Entry standards) and Expenditure per student.
The Complete University Guide adds Research quality (as measured by the Research Assessment Exercise), and Expenditure per student
The rankings give each university a score for each criteria, and will then apply a weight (level of importance) to that criteria. The criteria scores are multiplied by the weight and the resulting scores added together to make a total for each university.
While the source for the data for each of the tables is pretty much the same, each of the tables scores and then weights the data differently, so no two tables are exactly the same on any measure, let alone for the whole table.
So, what are the results of these rankings, and do they tell us anything useful?
Well, the results are pretty predictable: reputation, prestige and popularity breed reputation, prestige and popularity. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but essentially, the universities that have the most prestige and the strongest reputations are the most popular. They can push up their entrance grades, or they can expand as they see fit, becoming wealthier in the process.
Either of these choices will keep them high up the league tables. Their wealth allows them to have good staff/student ratios and good facilities, and so they generally keep their students satisfied.
Their students, who already had good grades on entry, stay on the course, and generally do well afterwards.
The 50 or so ‘old’ (pre-92) universities also have the advantage of greater research, which attracts stronger research staff, brings in more resources and results in higher rankings (particularly in The Times/Sunday Times Guide and The Complete University Guide).
It is therefore no surprise that the older, more established universities, occupy the higher positions in the league tables. You’ll see Oxford and Cambridge typically occupy the top spots (though unusually St Andrews hit number one in The Guardian and The Times/Sunday Times Guide this year). These are followed more or less in order by the oldest universities (UCL, Imperial, Durham etc.) through to the most recently established traditional research-intensive universities, down as far as about number 50 or so.
Even in The Guardian, where research quality is excluded, and the ‘value added’ criteria is in place, the same universities occupy the top positions, mainly because of their greater expenditure, higher staff/student ratio, higher entry grades and stronger graduate outcomes.
What is interesting though, is when you find exceptions. The top 10 of all three league tables is made up almost entirely of universities that date right back to the 1800s (or further). But three universities have consistently challenged these over the past decade: Warwick, Loughborough and Bath. Through high quality teaching and high student satisfaction, they now easily rival their more established counterparts. They are not the only ones, with Lancaster, Exeter and York not far behind. Each of these now also has a growing reputation that is beginning to match their lofty league table positions.
After the initial 50 or so research-intensive universities, things get a little trickier to understand in the tables. There are a handful of post-92, former polytechnics who seem to do consistently well: Oxford Brookes, Northumbria, Nottingham Trent and Coventry in particular, each of which regularly challenges some of the more traditional universities. This does not seem to be based on any specific criteria, but their consistency over many years does suggest that they have got something right in the management of their respective universities.
Outside of this group it is difficult to observe any specific patterns, and we see universities move up and down the tables from year to year, often rapidly. The statistical differences between universities are slight, and so small variations in just one or two criteria can send a university up or down twenty places in a year. And small variations in the weighting applied for each criteria by the different tables can mean big differences for universities across the three guides.
I’d argue that from around number 50 down, the league tables are basically not a reliable indicator of anything very much at all!
And what does this tell you as a student making your choice?
The main question I’d ask is whether they are measuring the right things for your choice.
In almost every piece of research I’ve seen about student choice, the majority of you say that what is most important to you is the content of the degree; the subjects taught, and the way they are taught. And the truth is that league tables tell you quite literally nothing about that; nothing at all.
You also say that you are interested in the quality of the education. In the current league tables, the best indicator we have are the measures of student satisfaction. If you look at the tables online, they allow you to order the entire table by just one criteria, and if you order it by student satisfaction, best to worst, guess what? The table becomes entirely unrecognisable with a number of highly ranked universities tumbling right down the table. There is virtually no correlation at all between student satisfaction and overall league table position.
However, I expect many of you do want to go to a reputable university, perhaps even a prestigious university. Afterall, the university’s reputation is going to be there, on your CV for life. Rightly or wrongly, these rankings do reflect and help to define reputation, and there are those who will draw conclusions about you, based on the university you went to.
And university reputations can and do change, albeit slowly. Those that are beating their peers in the league tables today are pretty likely to be the universities with the strongest reputations a few years from now.
So if reputation is the most important thing to you, feel free to follow the league tables, but only as far as around number 50 on the table.
If you are looking at lower ranked universities, by all means check for any significant issues with individual criteria that matter to you, such graduate employment, teaching satisfaction etc. If you find something that concerns you about a university you are considering, then check to see if the issue exists across different tables, and across different years. Otherwise, genuinely, I would just ignore them!
Subject rankings
The three main UK based rankings also have subject based tables; breaking up the subjects taught in universities into around 50 different areas, and offering a league table for each.
The Times/Sunday Times Good University Guide uses just four measures for their subject tables: student satisfaction, research quality, entry standards, and graduate prospects.
The Complete University Guide bases its subject tables on six factors: entry standards, student satisfaction, plus two based on research, and two on graduate outcomes.
The Guardian subject tables are made using exactly the same criteria as the main table.
This makes The Times/Sunday Times subject guides and The Complete University subject guides even less consistent or reliable than the main tables, and while The Guardian is more well rounded, sometimes there is so little data they can’t include a subject at all.
What the subject tables can show you is that there are some subjects and courses that are real hidden gems within relatively low ranked universities. And there are some absolute powerhouse departments within low ranked universities for some of the more modern subjects.
Take Media and Film Studies for example. There are seven universities in the top ten in The Guardian subject table, who don’t even trouble the top 50 overall in any table. You’ll find a similar story for a wide range of creative, sports and health related courses; lots of highly ranked subjects exist at low ranked universities.
However, there are still issues with the criteria, and the bigger question of whether they are measuring the things that are important to you.
International Rankings
There are also a number of international university rankings, the most prominent of these are probably the THE (Times Higher Education) World University Rankings and the QS World University Rankings. These rankings (alongside a number of similar world rankings based in the US, China and Russia), are calculated a little differently.
They again use a range of criteria, but criteria that can theoretically be compared across different countries; so academic and employer surveys are used, citations of research, proportions of international staff and students, plus more financial data.
You’ll be pleased to know that UK universities do pretty well across all of these tables, only beaten overall by the much larger US university sector. Oxford and Cambridge will be in the top ten in pretty much all of these tables, with Imperial College and UCL making either the top ten or top 20.
Compared with the UK tables, however, these tables tend to favour the larger universities; specifically the universities with the largest research capacity. So some of the small to medium sized universities that fly high in UK tables (such as St Andrews, Loughborough and Bath), don’t feature so highly in the world rankings.
Should you bother with them? Well, I’ll just put it out there that for most students looking to study in the UK, the world rankings should be pretty much irrelevant. The one thing they might tell you is a university's international reputation, which could be helpful if you are an international student yourself or if you were to seek employment abroad. Otherwise the criteria used are almost certainly irrelevant to your priorities.
In summary…
I hope that’s a helpful look at league tables and whether you should be using them. The summary I guess is this. They are helpful to understand reputation and prestige amongst the older and higher ranked universities. They might help you spot the universities whose reputations are on the rise. And the subject tables can help you find highly ranked subjects that exist within low ranked universities.
But do they really contain useful information about what is most important to you? Only you can be the judge of that!
