When is a top university not a top university?

Back in the spring, I used to keep seeing an advert on Facebook suggesting I should study for a British Masters degree at the “9th Best University in the UK”. The university in question was Liverpool John Moores University.

Now, I mean no disrespect to Liverpool John Moores, but it is not a university that has troubled the top 10 in any of the major league tables, so I was naturally curious about this claim to be ninth best? By what measure were they making this claim?

Well, the small print on the advert gave the source: Uni Compare.

Uni Compare gathers student reviews on a number of different measures, and you can read these on their website or app. So far so good! I like real student reviews, and in fact I like user reviews in general. I frequently use google reviews to find restaurants, cocktail bars etc. 

On Uni Compare, just like on google maps, reviews up to five stars can be given. They then publish a list of those with the highest amalgamated review scores, in order, best to worst. Sounds like a legitimate way to compare universities right? After all, what better than a review from the students who are actually there?

Well, I’m just not so sure. Google reviews work because everyone who goes to a restaurant or a movie has been to more than one, so they can compare. I can tell you what a good restaurant is like because I’ve been to hundreds of restaurants and have experienced good food and bad food, great service and terrible service. And I normally only review the restaurant after I’ve finished and left.

I can tell you that I absolutely love a particular film because I’ve seen hundreds of films, so I know what it feels like to get to the end, and walk out of the cinema elated, deflated, or perhaps in silent contemplation.

But what if I’d only ever been to one restaurant? Could I legitimately give it one star, or five stars? What if I’d only seen one film? Or worse still, what if I was asked to review it halfway through, before the desert, or even the bill, arrived? What if I reviewed the film before the final plot twist. What would that tell you? All it would tell you is whether my experience was better or worse than I expected at the time of the review! 

And so with university reviews, they really only tell us whether the experience is better or worse than the students expected, and only then at the specific time. They don’t tell you much at all about what it will be like to have finished your course, and they certainly don’t enable you to compare between different universities in any meaningful way.

I really wish we could get away from this obsession that we have with comparing everything by putting it in a league table from best to worst. Most things in life don’t work like that, and universities certainly don’t. The best university for one person could be the exact opposite for another. It seems to me far more helpful just to look at the reviews students have written, and judge for ourselves whether we think we would have the same reaction.

So, please do go ahead and have a look at student reviews on sites like Uni Compare. They’ll give you a terrific insight into students' lives on campus. Just don’t think for one minute that the ranking they produce is in any way useful in working out where the best university is for you.

As for Liverpool John Moores, since the latest version of the UniCompare ‘League Table’ was published in June, they are now number four. Clearly they are doing something right!

But does it mean they are the fourth best university for me to do a Masters?

Not at all, but I fear that the Facebook advertising algorithm might think so!

What next?

If you enjoyed this article, why not have a look at: Embrace the chaos: Nietzsche and choosing a university