Cambridge has taken the top spot in this year's Guardian University Guide league table, breaking its arch rival Oxford's six-year stint as the UK's leading institution.
Oxford has come second and St Andrews third, while the London School of Economics has climbed four places from last year to take fourth place.
University College London, Warwick, Lancaster, Durham, Loughborough and Imperial College make up the top 10.
The University Guide, published in full on the Guardian website on Tuesday, is based on data for full-time undergraduates at UK universities. The league table goes live on the website at midnight tonight.
Our analysis shows that universities with low rankings are almost as likely to be planning to charge maximum tuition fees of £9,000 in autumn 2012 as those with high rankings.
London Metropolitan University, which comes bottom of the Guardian tables, intends to charge between £4,500 and £9,000 for its degrees. Salford, Liverpool John Moores, Manchester Metropolitan and the University of East London – all of which rank in the bottom 20 – want to charge £9,000 for at least some of their courses.
The government's access watchdog, the Office for Fair Access, is looking at the fees each university in England wants to charge and will announce in July whether it approves.
All the English universities in our top 20 intend to charge £9,000 fees, apart from London School of Economics, which has not yet decided.
The first university that proposes to charge less than £9,000 for all of its courses is Sunderland, which is ranked 48th.
There are a total of 120 institutions in the tables: 38 in the top half intend to charge £9,000 for at least some of their courses, while 18 in the bottom half propose to do the same.
Universities are ranked according to how much they spend per student; their student/staff ratio; the career prospects of their graduates; what grades applicants need; a value-added score that compares the academic achievements of first-years and their final degree results; and how content final-year students are with their courses, based on the annual National Student Survey.
Birmingham City University has fallen most since last year – 24 places, from 66th to 90th – while Middlesex is the biggest climber, reaching 75th place this year compared with 112th last year. Durham has risen from 17th place to eighth.
While the oldest universities dominate the top positions in the tables, the newest have improved their rankings since last year. Winchester has leapt from 96th place to 69th.
The tables, compiled by an independent consultancy firm, Intelligent Metrix, are weightedin favour of the National Student Survey. As part of the survey, final-year students are asked to score their universities for overall satisfaction, feedback and contact hours. Other league tables concentrate more on research ratings.
The Guardian publishes an overall ranking table, separate tables to show which universities are best – and worst – for each subject and another table for specialist institutions.
The more a university spends on each student, the more likely it is to have a high ranking and the more satisfied its students seem. However, our judges took into account that some universities do not teach expensive courses, such as engineering, and so their spending is lower.
There is huge variation in how much universities spend per student, with an average of £3,428 in 2009-10 (a fall from the £3,495 the year before). At Oxford, average spend per student fell to £11,232 in 2009-10 from £11,410 the year before. The university spends substantially more than other institutions. Cambridge spent £8,612 in 2009-10, a rise from £8,118 the year before.
St Mary's University College in west London and Leeds Trinity University College spent among the lowest of all institutions per student.
The tables show that Cambridge has overtaken Oxford in philosophy, law, politics, theology, maths, classics, anthropology and modern languages. However, Oxford overtook Cambridge in psychology and also came top in chemistry, business and management, and art and design. Loughborough is best for sports science, while King's College London is top for dentistry. University College London topped the table for English, while Trinity Laban Conservatoire excelled for drama and dance. Northumbria has shot up the table for modern languages, from 48th last year to third this year.
Universities with high rankings tend to have fewer dropouts, and fewer students per academic. The top 20 institutions have a drop-out rate after the first year of just 4%, compared with almost 12% for the bottom 20.
There are 14.2 students per academic among the top 20, but 21.5 among the bottom 20. The smallest institutions tend to be ranked closer to the bottom.
Professor David Tidmarsh, vice-chancellor of Birmingham City University, says he expects his university's fall in position to be temporary: "It is caused by student number growth, which has now been curbed, and student satisfaction scores, which we expect to improve significantly as a consequence both of increased investment and of the way in which we are engaging students as partners in their learning experience."
He says the university is investing £180m in new buildings, facilities and equipment.
Swansea Metropolitan, Wolverhampton and Liverpool Hope did not allow the Guardian to use their data.
Meanwhile, the government has cut the number of places universities can offer on teacher training courses. Cambridge University, which comes top of our table for education courses, will have 49 fewer places on its teacher training course this September, an 11% cut. Altogether, almost 4,000 fewer places will be available on teacher training programmes.
A spokesman from the Department for Education says pupil numbers are falling sharply in secondary schools and so the need for new teachers has gone down.
• The Guardian University Guide 2012 league table of universities goes live at midnight tonight. Watch out for it on the front of the Guardian website. Subject tables and the table of specialist institutions will be available from Tuesday morning.
Comments
16 May 2011 4:31PM
Oxford University probably lost 1st place because it boasted about Cameron, Osborne and Gove being students there.
Would you want to go the same seat of study as these three?
16 May 2011 4:31PM
This article should be called 'Undergraduate University Guide' since you do not take into account postgraduate or research status or universities.
The methodology seems fairly flawed and possibly favours smaller research-intensive institutions (partly because grade requirement, one of your aspects, is likely to be inflated at institutions with smaller class sizes). Also, this survey is weighted strongly towards NSS which is undertaken prior to most final-year teaching (when the really high-level work really happens at research-intensive universities).
I believe THE World Uni Rankings and Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU: Shanghai Jiaotong rankings) are a much better indicator of the overall best universities.
16 May 2011 4:32PM
I'm sure we'll all have fun when the full tables come out. It is just a league table, parallels with football don't work with universities that are trying to do different things.
Meanwhile, I do hope that the Department for Education knows what it's doing:
'round here the primary schools are expanding to cope with demand.
16 May 2011 4:45PM
humejames - Just noted that in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU: Shanghai Jiaotong rankings) Cambridge is 5th and Oxford 10th.
16 May 2011 4:47PM
After reading this article I can't help wondering -- so what? ....... Some unis are more equal than others.
16 May 2011 4:48PM
Cue a load of moaning about elitism and how Cambridge should allocate its places based on central government quotas, usually specifying everything but academic merit.
One of the few world-class things we still have left in Britain and people can't resist trying to ruin it.
'If everyone can't have it, no-one can'- the mantra of socialists down the decades.
16 May 2011 4:49PM
Did you toss a coin?
16 May 2011 4:49PM
Is Birmingham City University the only one to be named after a football club? Of course, in the same city they have the University of Aston Villa.
16 May 2011 4:54PM
Woopie do. Any sensible student would be travelling to a Dutch university such as Maastricht (110 in the world ranking - better than most in the UK) where the fees are only £1500 a year and the teaching is in English.
Why would anyone want to get a £50,000+ debt going to a British university? Is that really such an advantage?
16 May 2011 4:55PM
They have the Bod and we have the UL... this is only fair to make up for punishment of the latter.
16 May 2011 4:57PM
And this merits a story? God how depressing.
16 May 2011 4:59PM
The idea of Durham being ranked 17th in the country is a little absurd to me based on the high quality of incoming students, and the reputation that it maintains nationwide.
16 May 2011 5:02PM
hoddle 1 - well, despite their obvious idiocy they've all found themselves able to join the ranks of the ruling elite, largely on the basis of privilege, arrogant self-belief and an unassailable sense of entitlement. For many that's very much something to emulate.
16 May 2011 5:02PM
No, if you can get an education at Oxford or Cambridge then go there. The recognition somone with a degree from Oxbridge will get will be a lot more impressive to future employers than Masstricht.
16 May 2011 5:06PM
Imagine the next boat race, its going to be immense and I for one can't wait !!!
Ahaha
16 May 2011 5:06PM
trystan82 raises a good question.
The question as to what extent UK universities all have the same academic standards is a timely one to ask as over the next few weeks a significant amount of money will be spent by institutions in the systematic pretence that degrees in a given subject at one university are indeed equivalent to degrees in that same subject at another.
This is called the external examination system and it involves universities paying staff members at other institutions to review coursework and examination materials. By the time you add up the cost of the fee plus postage, travel, accommodation and sustenance for the externals' annual visit (many departments have several and most universities employ dozens if not hundreds) the system is actually very expensive, as well as adding significantly to the complexity of marking and degree-awarding processes for internal staff.
And what does it actually provide? Well, the official line is that externals, as independent outside agents, help prevent fraud, protect students from unfair marking and ensure academic standards are benchmarked across the system. In reality, however, there's strong circumstantial evidence that this is untrue. Rampant grade inflation in recent years suggests that, to be kind, externals have not been very good at maintaining standards. The growing tendency for externals only to be shown carefully-selected samples and not to be allowed to change individual grades also means that they have little realistic chance of detecting and preventing actual cases of malpractice. And the fact that everyone with a pulse privately concedes that academic standards vary wildly across the university system, so that, say, a maths degree from Cambridge operates at a high intellectual level and will in due course be acquired by candidates with significantly greater ability than is the case at certain other institutions, is powerful reinforcement for the view that externaling has never been much more than a fig-leaf used to cover up the full extent of the divergence in standards from place to place.
A wag once observed to me that the only thing that the external examiner system actually achieves with any efficiency, apart from its increasingly unconvincing role in maintaining this pretence, is to distribute academic gossip around the country once a year.
My view is that that's still very true.
16 May 2011 5:07PM
This story may be about university rankings rather than tuition fees, but it shows the utter absurdity of prospective students being asked to pay the same for an Oxbridge degree as for one from the bottom of the table. It's like the government deciding that a Rolls Royce and a Daewoo should cost the same...
16 May 2011 5:07PM
Wow.. it seems my boyfriend is now going to a 'second-rate' university..
What lovely ammunition :)
16 May 2011 5:11PM
Disagree. After your very first job and outside the state sector employers care far more about competence than which degree where. Trouble is not very competent people often have not very good degrees. But there are enough not very competent people from Oxford and competent ones with no degree.
16 May 2011 5:11PM
@Steakauxpoivre
You're talking nonsense. Plenty of people I know had the intelligence to go to Oxbridge but excelled at other so-called 'lesser' universities. The real question is not 'have I the intelligence and/or connections to get into Oxbridge' but 'do I want to start working life with a £50,000 debt'.
16 May 2011 5:23PM
It's not as if Oxford and Cambridge are the only universities where you can rack up that kind of debt - considering Liverpool John Moores is planning on charging £9,000 a year, someone who is willing to pay over £9,000 per year for their education would be best off trying to get as much bang for their buck and going for Oxbridge, or any other of the top universities.
16 May 2011 5:26PM
They must have taken the boat race out of the equation ... and what about the quality of the food at the refectories? (Peterhouse, Cambridge, would win on that criterion). In 3 years we'll be treated to a return on investment set of criteria (how much different degrees actually cost) ... only then will we start the mass undergraduate exodus from England to European universities offering high quality courses in English without steep tuition fees.
16 May 2011 5:27PM
St Andrews, third? Can't wait to see the scores in the various criteria for that: "Student satisfaction with feedback: 3,840,983/100". Though this is perhaps just jealousy from an Edinburgh student where our student satisfaction ratings would be negative if they could be marked in such a way.
16 May 2011 5:33PM
Anyone thinking of going into media studies should take a gander at the "Job after 6 months" column.
Do the universities offering these courses make clear that the chances of having a job soon afterwards can be below 30 % ?? Or are they just happy to take the dosh?
16 May 2011 5:39PM
Makes up for all those Boat Race losses!
16 May 2011 5:48PM
Care to explain to me how my course–an art and design one in an old Poly–which produces graduates who have gone on to be stars in their field and elsewhere, and many other alumni who are happy doing interesting jobs and who, like all art and design students taught in old Polys and Art Schools and have helped create the vibrant culture we have in this country can be compared to a bunch of public school kids sitting in an English Lit tutorial at Cambridge?
You saying we're 'worse' and you're 'better'?
Think again.
16 May 2011 6:12PM
Iamtheurbanspaceman wrote at 5:11PM
". Plenty of people I know had the intelligence to go to Oxbridge but excelled at other so-called 'lesser' universities. "
Its only people who were not fortunate enough to go to an Oxbridge college that say that. Secretly, everyone would like to and you know it.
16 May 2011 6:16PM
andrebreton wrote t 5:48PM
'Care to explain to me how my course–an art and design one in an old Poly–which produces graduates who have gone on to be stars in their field and elsewhere, and many other alumni who are happy doing interesting jobs and who, like all art and design students taught in old Polys and Art Schools and have helped create the vibrant culture we have in this country can be compared to a bunch of public school kids sitting in an English Lit tutorial at Cambridge?
You saying we're 'worse' and you're 'better'?
Think again."
No - we are certainly more fortunate than you were because we attended an Oxbridge College. (in my case, Clare)
You can use the word "better" if you like- it is what it is.
16 May 2011 6:26PM
So long as you don't get an MBA. Every single person who I have ever work with who has an MBA is an idiot who has no idea how to do their job, and just BS their way through every meeting and every decision. MBA people are completely useless, avoid them like the plague.
16 May 2011 6:35PM
Come on then, let's all start talking about anyone who went to an ex-poly as if they thick-as-f*ck and completely worthless.
16 May 2011 6:47PM
@ andrebreton
If, say, you studied design at Northumbria, then I'm sure that anyone looking to employ design graduates would realise you were far better qualified than a Cambridge graduate. But, as a general rule - which is all any of these league tables are able to provide - a student at Cambridge will probably have enjoyed better teaching than one at Northumbria, and an employer will be more interested in them.
16 May 2011 6:49PM
Have people missed this bit of news,
Meanwhile, the government has cut the number of places universities can offer on teacher training courses.
'Michael Gove's plan to move training to the classroom.
Education secretary wants trainee teachers to learn their 'craft' by observing other teachers in schools rather than learning in universities'
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/apr/17/teacher-training-strike-gove-reform
Why waste money on educating working class children, when they won't be able to afford to go to university. How many Universities will still be on this list in 5 - 10 years time?
16 May 2011 6:49PM
It doesn't matter how bloody hard teaching staff work - and we do - if the university spends money on inflated management salaries rather than directly on the student experience, we can never climb up the league table.
And who does Management condemn when an institution lurks towards the bottom reaches of the NSS table?
Yup, teaching staff.
16 May 2011 6:55PM
Can anyone explain why almost all universities are charging £9000/year if they only spend an average of £3,428 ?
16 May 2011 7:02PM
Why would they be 50,000GBP in debt? 9000 pa over a 3 year period != 50,000?
16 May 2011 7:05PM
Loughborough above LSE?! Lancaster above Durham?!
Anyone in the world of higher education knows that this is absurd. The Guardian's league table is always throwing up unusual results - compare it to any (or, preferably, all) of the other major university league tables and you'll see what I mean. The problem is that it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, where the more able students will be inclined to apply to universities based on such idiosyncratic rankings.
Oh, and please stop referring to such rankings as if they were definitive:
We all know that this means little more than a reason to give light banter to those at institutions we might have overtaken in the last year.
16 May 2011 7:07PM
What this means to 99.99% of the population:
2010 Oxbridge
2011 Oxbridge
16 May 2011 7:12PM
Middle European perspective:
State school (free)
University MD degree (free)
Postgraduate education (almost free)
now:
Surgical trainee in the UK with NO debt
p.s. I have met many graduates from top medical schools in the UK, their knowledge about anatomy is far less, their overall knowledge is ok, but yes, they are more eloquent than me and appear more confident
p.p.s. my parents would have never had the many to send me to an english university btw
16 May 2011 7:12PM
The attitudes about Cambridge - and other universities - on this page are depressing. When I went there twenty years ago, around half the students were from state schools [there hasn't been a massive change since], and some of us had been to city comprehensives. I did.
So cut out the rubbish about public school students sitting in Eng Lit tutorials. Cambridge may be wrapped in privilege and mystique, but many of us went there because we had a chance to study a subject we loved, and to do so pretty intensely. Other places offered that too, but it was simpler back then, supported by free teaching and a maintenance grant.
Meanwhile, the right wing yahoos describe their education as 'better' because they went to the same university as me. *sigh*
All I know is that I had a great education, and that my friends had a damn sight less money than the people my girlfriend and sister met at UCL and Leeds respectively.
16 May 2011 7:14PM
The league tables are a joke.
I feel more qualified than most to comment as i have attended 3 of the top universities, whilst obtaining first a BSc, then a masters and finally a PhD.
i did my undergrad at loughborough and can say that although i enjoyed my time there, i would not put it above any of the russell group for academic subjects.
whilst i was there, we were given the now infamous "student satisfaction survey"
we were told to put 5 out of 5 for everything by the head of department as this would push lufbra up the rankings and would be beneficial for us when getting jobs (if our Uni had a higher ranking) It worked. In the times guide lufbra scored highest in the student satisfaction survey and jumped several places overall as a direct result. It also has a higher than average proportion of students graduating with second class degrees.
sports facilities are second to none.
clubs and societies are really good
local culture and nightlife is poor when compared to a city
it is a great uni, but not the 7th best in the uk.
A much more accurate representation is the research status of universities.
16 May 2011 7:24PM
Having had experience of both American and Canadian universities, I can say with confidence that Cambridge stands heads and shoulders above much of the world. It is probably among the last three of four truly world class institutions left in Britain (Oxford, Cambridge, BBC?)
Yes, there are issues of access and equality. But, let's not forget that the quality of teaching and research is simply the best in the country, bar none, and possibly the world. That is something to be proud of.
16 May 2011 7:25PM
*LSE should read Imperial. Which, incidentally, is ranked in this very newspaper as seventh in the world, though only tenth in Britain. Entirely consistent?
16 May 2011 7:25PM
Cambridge has won 80, Oxford 76. The word is 'defeats' not 'losses'.
16 May 2011 7:25PM
@Beazle no, I can honestly say that I have never or would never want to attend an Oxbridge college. In fact, it would have been impossible to do either of my degrees at Oxford or Cambridge. I'm a painfully average student, I only remember things if I understand them, so I was content to do subjects which were well off the curriculum of Oxbridge. Anyone who thinks that all subjects are clearly better taught at Oxbridge needs their prejudices rearranging.
My wife taught at Warwick for some years, and from what I observed of the students, I wouldn't have wanted to study there either.
16 May 2011 7:32PM
You'd be mad to do a UK degree these days. I was happy doing my degrees in the 90s and 00s (at an 'old' and 'new' uni respectively), and look back on both stints as a student fondly... but I can't help thinking that for £27,000 you could pay for good quality one-to-one tuition that would do far more for you than would a degree, and in a compressed timescale that gets you to work and earning more quickly too.
16 May 2011 7:36PM
dribble.
The only way you could say that with confidence would be if you had attended Cambridge surely!?!
what about MIT, Harvard, Scripps and many others?!?
Also, a lot of research from other UK institutions is world class. There simply is not room for all of the top UK based professors to work in Oxbridge!
Also it is important to realise that there are excellent academics in all most institutions. Granted, Oxbridge are likely to have a higher proportion of excellent academics, but the nobel prize for physics came from Manchester! and neither Heck, Suzuki or Negishi who won the chemistry prize attended or worked at oxbridge!
16 May 2011 7:42PM
er.............your league table still has oxford at number one, actually.
16 May 2011 7:44PM
I am at Cambridge now. Should have made that clear in my comment.
All are great, no doubt. But, the quality of undergraduate teaching at Cambridge is unparalleled. Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc, etc do not even come close the the rigour and quality of a Cambridge undergraduate education.
Of course, I did not say that world class research does not happen at other universities. Of course it does. My point was simply that in terms of overall output, Cambridge is miles ahead.
16 May 2011 8:01PM
@Baccalieri
They may have but who gives a Toss! What a load of bollocks, who actually cares about these 2 uni's?.....Jeremy Paxwoman maybe!
16 May 2011 8:02PM
Just a small addition to this discussion, but what sets Oxbridge apart is not really the quality of teaching in the abstract, but rather the 'supervision' system. Undergraduates get a few hours every week 1-on-1 with several Profs, lecturers, senior PhD students, etc. Because of the generally good pay, working conditions and its general reputation for research excellence (one might quibble or scoff, but the Oxbridge 'brand' carries enormous significance across the world), young students are consistently exposed to a variety top academics in, er, intimate settings (well, you know what I mean...)
Of course great thinkers don't neccessarily make great teachers, but that intensely interactive system makes for extremely good learning. A variety of factors: students can't doze off or skip class very easily, they enter into debate and discussion, rather than rote learning, they are forced to think for themselves, they have ample opportunity to clarify issues etc etc.) in a way that is often impossible in large lecture halls. Finally the intellecutal magnatism has a snowball effect (sorry to mix metaphors), so the range of visiting lecturers, public talks (who else could get Julian Assange or Steven Hawking for example, in the last few months?) can be quite mind-boggling if you have just arrived from a provincial university and take your studies seriously (ie, for the love it, not merely a paycheck).
On the downside, the elitism is not right at all and some students will depart thoroughly out of touch with the real world with no understanding of life 'on the other side'. But that's down to their own blinkers not the University