Today The Times published its annual rankings of 113 UK universities, based on 8 performance indicators:

• Student satisfaction
• Research quality
• Qualifications of new undergraduates (higher indicates more stringent entry standards)
• Student staff ratio
• Services and facilities spending per student
• Percentage of students achieving a degree or transferring to other institutions
• Percentage of graduates achieving first or upper second class honours degrees
• Percentage of graduates in graduate level employment or further study six months after graduation.

These criteria are not universally accepted and are not comprehensive, eg. graduate salaries 2 years after graduation might be a useful indicator, but is harder to compile.  Despite that, the Times rankings have achieved a degree of acceptance as one useful indicator of institutional standing, and are eagerly studied by students, parents, academics and bureaucrats.

The Top 10 are:

1. Oxford
2. Cambridge
3. Imperial College
4. London School of Economics
5. St Andrews
6. Warwick
7. University College London
8. Durham
9. York
10. Bristol

The Times’ league tables  have a host of information by subject area, disability, ethnicity, etc..  Although Oxford may top the overall rankings, when it comes to subject area rankings, Cambridge is top in 37 out of 61 individual subjects, whereas Oxford is top in just 5.

One of the least surprising findings is that 3 years after graduating, one third of graduates wish they’d chosen a different course.

I’m afraid my alma mater Brunel has been slipping down the rankings and now sits in the middle at #52.  Because of my responsibilities as a board member of New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Commission, I also keep an eye on Sheffield at #22 and Birmingham at #25: by some measures these equate roughly with the best NZ universities. (That’s not an official TEC position, by the way; it is a hotly disputed comparison!)