UK University Rankings

When considering spending your time and money on a postgraduate qualification it is important to know you’re spending money on something that’s worth it.

We’ve included a comparison table below to show two of the most popular UK University Ranking tables, The Times Good University Guide and The Guardian University Guide. An example of the types of metric used by these guides are shown below:

• Student Satisfaction
• Staff Student Ratio
• Expenditure / Spend per student
• Entry requirements (undergraduate level)

• Research Quality
• Students career prospects
• Number of International Students

The exact methodology used to determine the importance of each metric isn’t clear. There are also many factors that league tables do not acknowledge. It is partly for this reason, along with doubts about their methodologies and the difference in position of an institution across different rankings that has drawn a lot of criticism to this approach to comparing institutions.

Generally, the higher the position of your chosen institution on the table below the better this will look in the eye of your future employer. We strongly recommend that at postgraduate level you should put a greater weighting on the performance of a particular department/school rather than an institution. For example, whilst we know that Oxford and Cambridge offer a world class education if you’re studying in fields such as Sports Science or Creative Arts there are universities more distinguished in this field.

Once you’ve seen the overall league table we suggest you take a look at our subject directories to get a better idea of institutions that perform well in your chosen field and then find postgraduate courses in this area with our course search facility.