UK University Ranking 2015

UK University Ranking and Subject Ranking

For many students and parents, the UK university ranking published by the TIMES Good University Guide is a major reference when choosing their course of study. The ranking evaluates UK universities by criteria such as student satisfaction, research quality, entry standards, student-staff ratio and graduate prospect. With the release of the 2015 university ranking, we would like point out a few important changes in the ranking:

• Cambridge and Oxford is both number one in 2015.
• The same universities continue to occupy top-10 places in 2015. Some of them moved up 1-2 places while some moved down.
• Over 20 universities within the top 30 now offer some university foundation programmes. Many of these offer “Guaranteed Progression” with progression rates as high as 80% to 90% in the past.
• The most impressive improvements are brought by Falmouth University (51^st), De Montfort University (54^th) and University for Creative Arts (74^th), which went up 26, 32 and 25 places respectively. Improvement was shown in student satisfaction and entry standard in all three of them. Falmouth and De Montfort showed significant improvement in graduate prospect, while University for Creative Arts improved its student/staff ratio significantly, making its the lowest student/staff ratio among specialist art universities.
• Animal Science and Creative Writing now have their own rankings to better represent the competition in the areas.

The Importance of Subject Ranking

When looking at the university ranking table, students should be aware that it is based on overall performance of the universities, and therefore may not necessarily reflects a university’s strength in a specific subject area. For many reasons, some universities that are leading in a specific subject area might be ranked relatively low in the overall ranking table. This phenomenon is more common in newly developed subjects (such as hospitality & tourism). For students who have chosen a specific subject, subject ranking tables will be a better reference.