It is very difficult to judge competitiveness as it is comprised of both quantity and quality of applicants.
Looking just at quantity of applicants, using only the UCAS data for 2021 (the last year all the necessary data is available) you can compare the number of applications to the number of acceptances and then use number of acceptances as a very rough proxy (for the Russell Group and similar since they largely won't have a lot of places for these subjects that they don't fill) for the number of places available and develop a measure of 'quantity competitiveness'. There's better data from HESA on actual number of places to use for this if you really wanted to calculate properly rather than using proxy data.
Really if you are just focussed on getting an offer what you actually need to know is the offer rate rather than the number of applicants. Some courses have to make offers to a very high proportion of their applicants in order to fill their places because only a small proportion of those they make an offer to will actually choose to go there. There will be courses that have 1000 applicants and make 200 offers to fill 100 places and others that have 1000 applicants and will make 700 offers to fill 100 places.
The easily available UCAS data is for subject groupings. There are weak and strong subjects within each grouping. You also have no information on the relative strengths of the applicant cohort for each course - a university that asks for higher grades might not get as many applicants as the applicant pool is self-selecting and only those with the very highest grades will apply. However, competition between these applicants will be fierce. This is why Oxford, for example, does not appear to be exceptionally quantity competitive for HPRS - it has a very self-selecting applicant pool and within the HPRS grouping it has courses that are quite niche and which have fewer applicants per place but all those applicants are likely to be very good.
It is interesting looking at the historical data back to 2017 to see that the number of places on B&M courses keeps going up and up, but the number of places on the collective HPRS courses has actually declined at some RG universities. Only 4 universities (Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL and York) have more proxy places available on HPRS courses than they do on B&M courses).
Nonetheless, using the available UCAS applications and acceptances data, broadly what the data tells you is:
- There is no RG university that has fewer applications per (proxy) place for Business and Management than for Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies.
- Surprisingly, for the high ranked but non-RG universities, both Lancaster and Loughborough have more applications per (proxy) place for the collective HPRS subjects than they do for B&M.
BUT
- For 8 of the RG universities - Birmingham, Durham, Exeter, Glasgow, Liverpool, LSE, QUB and York - it's close enough that once we factor in weak and strong subjects within the collective subject groupings the difference in 'quantity competitiveness' between B&M and HPRS is pretty meaningless.
- For a further 10 there is a bit of a difference.
- For 4 - King's, Oxford, Sheffield and UCL there is a fairly large difference in applicants per (proxy) place for B&M and the collective HPRS subjects (Cambridge and Imperial are excluded because they do not have any courses designated as being in one or other of B&M or HPRS. Oxford only has a tiny number in B&M).
If you look at the ranking data in the list below (rather than the actual numbers, for ease of viewing. I can post the table with the actual numbers if you want) on the different measures, you can see, for example, that QML (6660 applicants, 1065 acceptances/proxy places) and Exeter (5365 applicants, 1170 acceptances/proxy places, giving them the smallest number of applicants per place) had a relatively high number of applicants for B&M but also a lot of places so the sheer number of applicants doesn't actually mean there were a high number of applicants per place (relative to the other RG universities). UCL on the other hand did not have as many applicants for B&M but it was very competitive to get a place as there were also not many places available (3635 applicants, 230 acceptances/proxy places, giving them the 2nd largest number of applicants per proxy place behind Oxford which only had 45 acceptances/proxy places for 865 applicants).
2021 University | B&M rank by applicant numbers (rank by quantity competitiveness most to least) | HPRS rank by applicant numbers (rank by quantity competitiveness most to least) | Rank by difference in quantity competitiveness between B&M and HPRS smallest to largest
Manchester | 1 (5) | 2 (4) | 17
Leeds | 2 (9) | 8 (6) | 12
King's | 3 (4) | 3 (5) | 20
QML | 4 (18) | 22 (21) | 15
Birmingham | 5 (11) | 14 (3) | 5
Warwick | 6 (10) | 15 (12) | 16
Edinburgh | 7 (7) | 1 (9) | 18
Bristol | 8 (8) | 7 (2) | 11
Exeter | 9 (22) | 6 (20) | 3
Nottingham | 10 (12) | 10 (14) | 13
LSE | 11 (3) | 12 (1) | 4
Sheffield | 12 (6) | 17 (10) | 19
Liverpool | 13 (14) | 18 (15) | 6
Durham | 14 (15) | 9 (17) | 8
Cardiff | 15 (16) | 16 (18) | 9
Southampton | 16 (13) | 19 (16) | 10
Newcastle | 17 (19) | 20 (22) | 14
UCL | 18 (2) | 5 (11) | 21
Glasgow | 19 (20) | 13 (7) | 2
York | 20 (17) | 11 (19) | 7
QUB | 21 (21) | 21 (13) | 1 (smallest difference between courses)
Oxford | 22 (1) | 4 (8) | 22 (largest difference between courses)
BUT, actually it's all pretty meaningless. Getting accepted into university is not a destination in itself. You shouldn't disregard your future aspirations, for your university experience and for your career, just to achieve some temporary accolade. Your life does not end at the point at which you are accepted onto a university course.