What makes a “good” university? Why league tables disagree

Look up a university in three different league tables and you’ll often find it in three very different places. That isn’t because one table is wrong. They’re measuring different things and adding them up in different ways.

Once you know what’s inside a ranking, you can use it properly: as a starting point for questions, not as the answer.

Why the tables disagree

Every league table does the same three things:

1. Picks some measures, such as student satisfaction, entry grades or graduate jobs.
2. Decides how much each one counts, which is called the weighting.
3. Adds them up into one score and sorts the list.

Change any of those three steps and the order changes. Here’s how three of the best-known UK tables differ:

• The Complete University Guide includes research quality and research intensity (from the REF, the national research assessment), alongside student satisfaction, entry standards, graduate prospects, student–staff ratio, spending on academic services and facilities, and continuation.
• The Guardian University Guide leaves research out completely. It focuses on the student experience: satisfaction, student–staff ratio, spending per student, entry grades, continuation, career prospects and a “value added” score, which compares students’ degree results with the grades they arrived with.
• The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide also includes research quality, along with the share of students getting a first or 2:1, plus satisfaction, entry grades, spending, staff ratios, continuation and graduate prospects.

So a university that does world-class research but has crowded lectures can score highly in one table and much lower in another. Neither table is lying. They just value different things.

The measures that matter most to students

Some measures tell you a lot about what your three years would actually be like. Others mostly tell you about the university as an employer of academics.

Usually useful to you:

• Student satisfaction: from the National Student Survey, filled in by final-year students about their own course.
• Continuation: how many students carry on into their second year. Lots of drop-outs can be a warning sign.
• Graduate outcomes: how many graduates are in professional jobs or further study, and what they earn.

Less directly useful:

• Research quality: great if you want to go into research, but it doesn’t tell you how good the teaching is.
• Entry grades: these show how hard a course is to get into, not how good it is. A high entry tariff mostly means it’s popular.
• Spending per student: it can help, but more money doesn’t always mean a better experience.

Subject matters more than the university

A university’s overall rank is an average across every subject it teaches. The university that’s 5th overall might be 40th for the course you want, and a university you’ve never heard of might be one of the best in the country for it.

That’s why it’s always worth looking at the subject ranking, not the overall one.

Official ratings you might see

You’ll also see universities in England advertise a TEF rating (Teaching Excellence Framework). It’s a government rating of undergraduate teaching and outcomes: Gold, Silver, Bronze or Requires improvement. The current ratings were awarded in 2023. It covers the whole university, not your course, so treat it as one piece of the picture.

How we rank universities

We built our rankings around the question most students actually have: if I do this course here, how is it likely to go? So:

• We rank by subject only. There’s no overall table.
• We use official course-level data from Discover Uni, published by HESA, and nothing from reputation surveys.
• We use five measures: student satisfaction (25%), graduate jobs (25%), graduate salary (20%), continuation (15%) and entry grades (15%). Entry grades carry the least weight because they show who gets in, not how good a course is.
• We leave out research, because it says little about teaching.
• Nobody can pay to be listed or to move up.

The full calculation, including how we handle small courses, is on our How we rank page.

How to use rankings well

1. Start with the subject, not the university’s name.
2. Look at the individual measures, not just the rank. A course in 20th place with excellent satisfaction might suit you better than one in 5th place with poor satisfaction.
3. Ignore small differences. The gap between 12th and 18th is often tiny.
4. Check more than one source and see where they agree.
5. Visit and read the course details before you decide.

Ready to look? Browse the rankings by subject, or try the Find your uni quiz.

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