Sunday Times University League Table

[thing47]

Just having a look at yesterday's new league table. No real surprises in the top 20, Surrey is the big mover just outside that, up from 32 to 22, and further down the list Northumbria has moved up from 62 to inside the top 50.

Universities of the year are Bath and NTU (Modern University of the Year).

The 'Best for Teaching Quality' sub-table made me take a second look, as with the exception of St Andrews the top 10 is all non-RG, lesser-known universities. But that category is student-assessed so I don't really see how many students are in a position to compare objectively how good their teaching is to another university…

Of course league tables have to be taken with a (large) pinch of salt, but always worth a glance.

Research quality - not a huge surprise

ucas points

graduate prospects St Georges is the outlier as compared with its overall ranking (lower rank but high prospects) and on the flip-side just in the top half overall rank wise but low scoring on grad prospects University of the Creative Arts.

completion rates

school type mix

Northern Ireland school system evident, no prizes for guessing which is Queens Belfast.

Likewise though not in the upper echelons Oxford Brookes and Royal Agri College east to spot

then state schools (excl grammars); grammars and indies each shown as a separate scatter graph.

To avoid completely distorting the grammar graph the y axis cuts off some way below the NI levels

ethnic minorities - a more mixed picture

1st gen students

low participation areas

and lastly applicants per place

Interesting graphs. Thank you for sharing them.

Graun rankings out as well. If a sizeable pinch of salt is needed for the ST or CUG tables, then an entire salt mine is needed for the Graun.

Although to be fair to them the top end (ie top 20) differs little, a few slightly different places but largely the same set of unis.

York and Birmingham are in the ST top 20 - ranked 17th and 20th - and are 21st and 27th in the Graun, not huge differences.

They are replaced in the Graun by Leeds at number 20 , 23rd in ST minimal difference.

Then at 19th in the Graun is Arts London, 56th in ST

Other outliers

Bolton 38th in Graun but 124th in ST - the biggest by far

Sunderland 50th in Graun; 100th in ST

Aston 22nd in Graun 45th in ST

UWE 24th in Graun, 61st in ST

Conversely

Nottingham 65th in Graun, 30th in ST

Newcastle 64th in Graun, 34th in ST

Reading 61st in Graun, 31st in ST

not sure how easy to read but these are the full rankings by ST order showing the Graun rank as well.

Great table! (Btw Southampton Bristol and Strathclyde are equal 16th in Graun, not 16/17/18)

Could anyone speak really slowly and explain the key differences between ST and Graun tables? I know Graun put more emphasis on student satisfaction, is that right? And how to they compare to other league tables eg good uni guide etc?

I wonder how to weight the importance of the whole institution in comparison to the course? For instance for Music at Bangor comes a very respectable 8 and 9th in the Graun and CUG but Bangor as a whole is in the 40s/60s/80s in ST/CUG/Graun. So it looks like a great insurance option and a lovely place to go for various reasons....and yet you end up with a Bangor degree and if you don't end up in the musical world then is that a bit of hindrance?
(Do also recognise that apart from all the usual caveats about League Tables, Music is a complicated picture as degrees vary enormously as they vary from essentially being an essay based Humanities degree to full-on music production, plus the complication of specialist Music institutions).

Hi, @aesopstables - The G themselves say that they do not consider research in compiling their league table. The weightings are all on components of direct benefit to students. I think that is the main difference.

@poetryandwine thats helpful thank you. Which other league tables are useful for comparison would you say? There seems to be such variance as well in looking at subject specific vs overall ranking. I guess it depends on career/subject as to what is important to employers - and appreciate that this is only one consideration as a whole anyway (and that many firms blind recruit re Uni).

its hard to work out what is what - some say it’s all irrelevant: just pick the uni that’s right for you, the course content is the most important thing, plus the whole snobbery around Russell Group: justified or not (or the new snobbery which now adds St A, Bath, Lboro ), whilst others are all about league tables - but which ones?!

If there is high student satisfaction it probably means they sit around drinking all day and don't do much work so I have always taken that with a pinch of salt. Anyway at least there are all these measures out there so people can pick based on what matters to them.

I agree the NSS data which are from final year students are controversial, and that most of the reasons for this suggested upthread are valid. AFAIK this is the main basis for the student satisfaction with the uni or unit of study, in all the league tables.

Each applicant needs to decide how to weight the unit of study vs the uni. I think someone with special needs, particularly physical or mental health issues, is well advised to consider how supportive the uni as a whole is, as this will set the tone for its sub-units.

I had a post upthread about the role of a research uni for bright UGs vs a strong and more singular focus on very high quality teaching in the context of highly able peers (St Andrews being the British exemplar). It is a personal choice with no right or wrong answer. IMO Durham also skews in this direction, at least inSTEM (though I must emphasise that some excellent research is being done in both places).

Instead of using more league tables, I would encourage pupils to join the online forum TheStudentRoom and ask carefully targeted questions of all kinds about universities and units of study they are considering. Vague questions will not necessarily generate useful answers but specific ones often will.

Great table! (Btw Southampton Bristol and Strathclyde are equal 16th in Graun, not 16/17/18)

@aesopstables you are quite correct, I've not shown the various equal placements (in either ST or Graun table), largely given the inexact nature of the tables removed the need for such preciseness. 😀or perhaps to be more candid as it did not affect any of the unis my DC went to / are currently at I simply didn't bother, which I confess it is a bit of a poor attitude on my part.😁

Could anyone speak really slowly and explain the key differences between ST and Graun tables? I know Graun put more emphasis on student satisfaction, is that right? And how to they compare to other league tables eg good uni guide etc?

Guardian don't include research via the Research Excellence Framework (REF) results, which is a huge omission. It means you don't really have an indicator of the intellectual quality & standing of the academic staff teaching your DC.

The REF is a 7 yearly national survey of each department's research excellence, with a sample of research from each department read by expert peer reviewers, plus an evaluation of the 'research environment' and the level of impact beyond academia that this research has.

It gives you an indication of whether your DC will be taught by staff who are considered to be internationally reputable scholars.

My advice is to look at the league table for the discipline. Look at each KPI (key performance indicator) and evaluate how important each one is. Some are not in control of the academic staff who'll be teaching your DC eg staff-student ratio, spend per student. They indicate how the university distributes its income.

But my advice is ALSO - these league tables are put together by newspapers. They have NO official standing in the HE system. They tell you something, but not everything ... They want to sell papers.

There is little substitute for visiting a campus, or digging deep into the Department/discipline's website. You can generally find most of the information current students use publicly available (eg module options, reading lists, module descriptions) and also public webpages of academic & support staff where you can see what they specialise in, what research they do. Do you want to be taught by world experts? Including world experts who also win prizes or have substantial qualifications in HE teaching? The myth that a top-class researcher is necessarily a bad teacher is just that - a myth.

You need to get past the 'shop window' of university websites - look for a section or link like "About Us" or "Our Departments and Schools"

lol @boys3 😂 you can probably guess why I zoned in on it

That’s really useful info thanks @poetryandwine and @BirdinaHedge

Oh and I should add - my cynicism - or intellectual caution, perhaps - about league tables is not affected by my own department or university's standing. My department, for example, is currently in the top 3 nationally on both the Sunday Times and the Guardian tables and is regularly top of one or the other (or both) & rarely out of the top 5. And my university is ranked in the top 100 internationally in various international league tables.

Yes! There are also international league tables (to add to your joy ). You'll find them via the Times Higher magazine.

Great thread @thing47. I will go against the grain and defend the National Student Satisfaction (NSS) survey. I have no professional involvement nor any particular axe to grind. As @poetryandwine flags, there are granular qualitative sources of info, such as on Student Room, which can provide very useful insight. The NSS complements these by providing more structured, quantitative, large sample, research.

Some interesting analysis was published over the summer (link at end of post) about the relationship between satisfaction and post-course outcome (eg graduate job, post grad ed). You can drill down by institution, broad subject area and specific satisfaction questions. The results are interesting and perhaps contrary to what many might assume.

This is no clear trend of 'easy courses are unfairly rewarded with high satisfaction ratings'. There are demanding courses at selective universities with very good satisfaction courses and equally institutions at the other end of the scale with poor scores.

There can be big differences in satisfaction, within the same subject areas, between similarly selective institutions. This suggests some universities and departments are firing on all cylinders and others are not.

If we are to discern broad differences in terms of satisfaction then I'd suggest the driver is about students' contact time. Typically, Chemistry degrees generate high satisfaction rates (all that lab time), Maths and Computer Science slightly less so (fair bit of solo problem sheets and coding), humanities often score much lower rates (lots of solo reading and essay composition).

This raises interesting questions about whether humanities students are embarking on courses with unrealistic views about the degree to which their studies are necessarily self-directed or whether perhaps (some) humanities departments are choosing not to, or are unable to, dial back up contact as pandemic constraints ease.

wonkhe.com/blogs/proceed-and-nss-not-so-much/

I’m not saying REF results are irrelevant - but there is no guarantee that these ‘internationally reputable scholars’ who are driving high REF scores will be doing significant amounts of undergraduate teaching. Plenty of high ranking institutions rely on post docs and other relatively junior academics to deliver undergraduate courses.

I agree with you that it is a myth that top class researchers are bad teachers - but they are not automatically good teachers, or very active teachers, either.