The bumper thread of University League Tables discussion - includes an info post

Physics is also a very popular course to study.
A lot of UCL's courses demand high entry requirements, but not Physics.
This is UCL, one of the most famous and prestigious universities in the UK.
UCL is in London.

But surely a good university should be enjoyable to attend. Given how little institution actually matters when it comes to getting a job, I'd advise against putting yourself through 3 years of hell to have a 3% better chance at being in a graduate job after 6 months. In my opinion these rankings to a great job at factoring in all the different factors and crunching the numbers into a great measure of university v university.

Physics is also a very popular course to study.
A lot of UCL's courses demand high entry requirements, but not Physics.
This is UCL, one of the most famous and prestigious universities in the UK.
UCL is in London.

I've heard that their lab facilities are poor in comparison to other top Universities. Also their entrance requirements of AAB (for 2011 at least) are pretty low compared to other top Universities (Imperial is A*AA, for example). In the CUG's league table, a pretty reliable league table, its Physics department ranked 19th in 2012 and 13th in 2013.

Yes. I'd mostly ignore student satisfaction, as they often have little to do with the academic side of a university. Note how the top unis for satisfaction are almost never the top academic universities (enter Loughborough, Bath etc.).

My main question is how employers see the unis.


Could you say a bit more on that? Cheers

Yeah, that shocked me! AAA-AAB is what it says now, but that seems ridiculous! Is it really that bad a course?

Yeah, that shocked me! AAA-AAB is what it says now, but that seems ridiculous! Is it really that bad a course?

Out of curiosity if everyone were to compile their own top 20 - based purely on opinion of prestige, job prospects and academic research what would they be?

I'd go for (and bare in mind this is an extremely rough list not intended to insult anyone's institution)

1) Cambridge/Oxford
2)
3) UCL
4) Durham
5) LSE
6) Imperial
7) Edinburgh
8) St Andrews
9) Bristol
10) Warwick
11) Kings
12) Nottingham
13) Manchester
14) Leeds
15) York
16) Sheffield
17) Exeter
18) Newcastle
19) Lancaster
20) Bath

Again many could go up one or two places but what would everyone else's be - purely out of curiosity. Don't get upset by this if your uni isn't mention, just correct me.

aab... Yeah it's terrible, a travesty!
Are you by any chance trolling?

Don't be daft. The undergraduate course is pretty good, and it has good facilities at PG level for HEP, astrophysics and nanotech (being part of LCN). Some of its research labs in the old part of the building are a bit dilapidated but as an undergraduate that doesn't mean anything to you. The entry requirements may be AAB-AAA, but last year the average entrant had the equivalent of A*A*Aa.

The entry requirement was going past it on the bus a few years ago. May have risen due to grade inflation.

But, the thing is, are they "weak" if you are going to enjoy being there?

Crap, meant to rep for that (not that I dislike the uni or anything, just reminded me of something) and mis-clicked. Will rep you in 30 days.

So I've been looking through the Guardian's rankings, and I found that they were often completely different to what I expected, Physics http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/table/2012/may/22/university-guide-physics being an example.


1Oxford 100.0 93 90 79 9.4 9 621 6 77
2Lancaster 96.5 96 96 91 7.6 9 440 8 66
3St Andrews 92.1 99 96 72 9.8 8 563 3 81
4Manchester 90.0 96 96 74 11.1 9 495 7 70
5Birmingham 89.9 94 89 72 10.0 8 503 6 75
6Liverpool 88.2 96 96 75 8.8 10 401 6 73
7UCL 86.8 91 87 66 8.2 9 509 8 75
8Sussex 84.8 96 95 87 8.9 3 409 9 65
9Edinburgh 83.3 94 89 67 11.6 10 514 7 64
10Durham 82.5 92 87 71 11.2 4 574 6 80
11Leeds 82.3 93 90 77 12.3 4 435 4 89
12Imperial College 81.8 87 82 52 10.2 8 588 7 78
13Royal Holloway 80.0 92 90 77 8.2 6 352 6
14Warwick 75.2 83 83 66 13.3 7 528 6 80

So apparently Lancaster, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Sussex and Leeds are all better than Imperial?

I realised that the requirements for a high ranking have *nothing* to do with the quality of the university (as in, how good in terms of difficulty of content you are studying) - it's all rubbish like "satisfied with teaching", "satisfied with course" etc. How on earth can Imperial (a sciences university) be six places further down in the UK than it is worldwide?

Rankings all seem to be completely messed up - looking worldwide, apparently Leeds, KCL and Manchester outdo Durham and Warwick in the Times' reputation rankings.

How much attention do employers pay to rankings?

If, for example, I took Theoretical Physics at UCL, I would have thought that should be considered as one of the top 4-5 in the country, and top 10-20 in the world. A quick peek at rankings, however, tells me otherwise, with what I thought to be 'lesser' universities coming higher up.

If I've said anything stupid, please don't neg, just explain it to me as this is a serious question.

Today a new league table is born, the 100 best worldwide universities under 50 years old.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/Journals/THE/THE/31_May_2012/attachments/THE_100_Under_50_.pdf

Like all the best league tables, it looks like it is going to be deeply controversial.

The UK entries are:-

8 York
9 Lancaster
10 UEA
13 Warwick
20 Essex
35 Brunel
37=Bath
50= Stirling
56 Surrey
60 Plymouth
61 Keele
62 Hertfordshire
69 Loughborough
71 Strathclyde
72= Heriot Watt
72= LJMU
80 Kent
83 Aston
90 City
92 Bradford


I should add that Sussex is too old. I suspect Newcastle and Dundee which were calved out out other universities in the 1960s have been deliberately omitted.

The pre-92 universities which do not appear in the list are Salford, Cranfield (though it wasn't called a university until 1993 it had university powers since the 1960s), Open, Ulster and Buckingham.


Let battle commence

All the best league tables are controversial? Seemed to me like the controversial ones where the ones that switched things around massively each year (and so are probably the worst league tables).

That was tongue in cheek. Remember the job of a newspaper or magazine is to sell newspapers, magazines and advertising.

Here is the article which accompanied it

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=419908&c=1