TSR Wiki > University > Choosing a University > University League Tables - A Users Guide
League Tables are one of the most popular topics in GUD. Nowadays, every newspaper going seems to produce some annual frenzy of comparison – with the Times, Independent, Guardian, and Sunday Times all publishing some form of ranking. This is to say nothing either of the independent guides (such as push.co.uk), or the world rankings (Shanghai, Times Higher Educational Supplement). With such a dizzying array of tables, it’s not surprising that there is so much confusion and disagreement over how much importance to place on them. This article attempts to clear up some of that confusing and teach you how to interpret League Tables so as to make the best use of them in choosing a university.
--IlexAquifolium 15:09, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
League Tables: A User’s Guide
Why are League Tables Produced?
It’s easy to forget that league tables were unheard of until 15 years ago. This partly explains the profusion of posts on TSR claiming that ‘X league table can’t be right, Bristol / Leeds / Newcastle have done worse than Westminster / Reading / Sussex!’. Before the production of league tables (and the introduction of the 1992 universities), applicants to UCAS (or UCCA, as my mum assures me it was originally known) generally had only the advice of their teachers, parents, or friends to go on. It is not surprising that this advice generally favoured old, well-known universities, which fed into the notion of ‘prestige’.
Unless you spend all day reading TSR, or work for a university, you are most unlikely to be familiar with every university in the UK. This does not mean that the universities you are not aware of are rubbish – if you think about it, this is a pretty strange assumption. Interpretation of league tables on TSR and in the real world is however loaded with all sorts of beliefs about which universities are ‘good’ (generally old, well-known, familiar) and which are ‘bad’ (new, unknown). These beliefs may in some cases be quite outdated, or at least uncorrelated with league tables. Which is right? That’s your decision, as applicants, to make. Knowing what league tables actually do is a very good first step to interpreting them in a way that actually benefits you.
What is ‘Prestige’?
It’s pretty hard to read GUD without stumbling across at least one thread making statements or comparison about ‘prestige’. Sometimes these come from pre-university applicants who are panicking that their university choices will doom them to a life of working in McDonalds, or sometimes they come from bragging first-years who want to make sure that the world knows ‘mine is bigger than yours’. What they usually have in common is a total lack of a clear understanding of what ‘prestige’ means. There is a good reason for this: there isn’t one.
Everyone seems to have some innate sense of what is, or isn’t, ‘prestigious’ in university terms. I’ve yet to see anyone come up with a workable definition, but the common sense answer seems to contain some combination of the following:
- Big, old, nice buildings, high entry requirements, very rich, famous, lots of alumni in politics / journalism / investment banking / science, my mum has heard of them, large research output, mentioned in the newspapers, lots of competition to get in, oh, and did I mention rich?
Of course, I jest a little bit. But the point is that ‘prestige’ is not something that can be measured. It isn’t a concept that can be broken down into constituent parts for exact comparison – because neither those parts, the weight of each, or their meaning can be agreed upon or measured. So, league table rankings are not the same thing as prestige. Prestige is something with no factual basis that gets used to all sorts of ends. GUD posters go around in circles for hours arguing over it. This is not likely to ever stop, but at least recognising that league tables do not measure prestige is a good first step to understanding what they do measure.
How do League Tables Work?
The first, perhaps obvious, thing to say is that university league tables are not like football league tables. In a football table, position is determined by one factor (who wins), the rules of the game are well-known and clear (3 points for a win, 1 for a draw, none for a loss) and the scoring system is set up to try to generate clear differences between teams (favouring winners). As such, whilst you could argue that the points system should be different, the ways in which teams are judged to have won was widespread acceptance and is intuitive and obvious.
The same cannot be said for university tables. This is because they are compound indicators. There is no one way to measure which university is better than another, because it is not a straightforward concept (unlike winning at football). This means that the concept is multi-dimensional – that means, there is no one scale on which to measure ‘betterness’. The concept has to be operationalised (broken down into different expressions, which can be measured) before it can be ranked.
There are obviously many different ways in which you could look at ‘betterness’.
- The first is the university itself – what attributes does it have which could make it good? Does it have a lot of money to spend on undergraduates? Good facilities? Lots of research or teaching staff? Is the research the lecturers put out good? (It should be noted that many of these concepts are themselves hugely ambiguous and thus contentious – the most obvious being research quality, since you can’t measure quality through quantity).
- The second is to measure the outputs – that is to say, the students. What grades do they exit with? Are they well taught? Is there a lot of competition for places? Do they enjoy the experience?
Indeed, by and large, these are the sorts of concepts that university league tables do measure. But there are different ways of measuring each, and since the league tables are compound indicators, each of these different dimensions can attract different weightings in producing the overall rankings. These differences – in metrics and weighting – explain the variation from one table to the next. So, what you choose to measure largely determines the result you get. This is why so many posters in GUD stress that you should not take league tables at face value.
What League Tables Do
What do they Measure?
As aforementioned, the precise metrics and weighting used will differ from table to table. Subject tables will simply combine these numbers, and the ‘university league table’ will just average the subject data. However, common themes include:
- The proportion of graduates with ‘good’ degrees, which is to say, 2.1s and firsts. The national average is around 50% 2.1s and 10% firsts, so the degree to which a particular course deviates from this can indicate one of several things: excellent (or above average) teaching; a particularly talented crop of undergraduates; or a course in which it is more easy than average to do well. It may be tempting to leap to the final conclusion (which a fair few posters do where the ‘new’ universities are concerned), but it should be noted that the courses with the highest proportion of firsts tend to be STEM subjects at the ‘old’ universities: for instance, 40% of maths students at Oxford graduated with firsts.
- Entry standards, usually in the form of the average UCAS points total for the previous year’s starting cohort. These give an indication of the A level performance of the cohort; and by the same token the competitiveness of the entry process (since a very popular course with few places is likely to be able to pick more qualified candidates). Problems with this as an indicator include the fact that A levels may not be a reliable indicator of intelligence (being highly correlated with social class), and the fact that universities can ‘massage’ competitiveness indicators by, if necessary, restricting spaces on a particular course. Combinations of these two indicators result in the Value Added Scores used by some tables (such as the guardian).
- Staff numbers, in the form of a staff : student ratio, used as a rough-and-ready proxy for the amount of ‘student attention’. This self-evidently tells you bugger all about what it’s actually like to be taught in a department, since many staff may not teach undergraduates at all. Conversely, there may be such numbers of teaching-active associate tutors (PhD students) that you can gain lots of personal attention. Better indicators (rarely included in league tables) are the average class size, which you can obtain from the departments you’re interested in; and the overall size of the department, which may give you an indication of the range of different module options available.
- Staff research scores, usually graded from the last RAE. There is more information on the RAE here, and discussing its strengths and weaknesses could take up entire papers (indeed, it has). Suffice it to note that the RAE is produced by the government as a means of judging research quality in order to dole out funding. Selections are peer-reviewed by panels of well-known academics. As such, whilst it may be useful within academia, it has very little to do with teaching or the undergraduate experience. Being at a department with cutting-edge researchers can be an excellent experience, but how much undergraduates will have to do with the research is somewhat unpredictable.
- Teaching scores and student satisfaction, previously measured through the Teaching Quality Assessment (TQA) which graded departments out of 24; but since the TQA hasn’t been run for several years this is increasingly being phased out in favour of the National Student Survey (NSS). The latter is a really excellent means of getting an insight into the student experience, and the results can be found on www.unistats.com. Essentially, all graduating finalists are invited to fill out a questionnaire on their experience. Only departments with over 50% completion (which in the case of big departments can mean 100 or more respondents) are included. This is probably the only insight into what it’s actually like to study at a department, and the results are often surprisingly at odds with other league table indicators – highlighting the fact that prestigious universities don’t always offer the most appropriate environments for some students.
- Graduate employment, the full panel data for which is again available at unistats.com. Essentially, universities follow up their graduates six months after graduation to find out what they have gone on to do, and the full breakdown is then submitted to the HEFCE (higher education funding council) which publishes it on unistats. This full data is very informative since it classifies types of employment. The statistics used in league tables however are usually next-to useless, since it averages all this information into one score, often out of 10 as an indicator of ‘graduate prospects’. The other information used to compile this is often average starting salary. One word of warning: take the latter with a pinch of salt. For instance, in national surveys, social work graduates come out very well whilst law graduates’ average starting salaries tank in comparison. Why? Social workers go straight into a (usually) guaranteed job with a decent starting salary that then doesn’t rise. The most successful law graduates conversely go into the LPC / BVC and then vocational training that pays very badly, but gives them enormous future earning potential. Remember that these surveys are conducted six months after graduation.
- University spending, used to indicate the amount the university spends on student facilities. On the face of this is a useful and good indicator of the amount of care universities take over their students’ studying conditions. The unfortunate consequence of this is that universities have started diverting funds from other worthy causes (like outreach programmes or scholarships, which are arguably better uses for their money but don’t count in league tables) into things that are included, like new computers, or gyms. This probably won’t concern your average applicant, but one has to question slightly how many new gyms a university actually needs.
What numbers come out?
The raw data emerging out of these sources are not often readily amenable to being ranked. For instance, RAE scores are published as a panel with percentages of research falling into 4 categories. This has to be processed into a single (percentage) figure by the compilers before it can be used as a weighted metric. There is inevitably some detail lost in this process. The other factor of note here is that the processing of data often results in only very tiny differences. As such, a really, really small fluctuation in one indicator can often result in massive leaps up or down a league table.
So before dismissing a university that is 10 places further down than another, check the differential of their scores and what actually contributes to this. If it is that university B spends 10% less and has 10% worse RAE / employment prospects, this definitely merits further investigation, since in practice those differentials are so small that they are unlikely to impact on the student experience – and the process of data mashing to produce those percentages may obscure even smaller differences.
How do I use them?
If you’ve been reading this guide attentively to this point you should by now be extremely savvy about what league tables exist to do. So in many respects you should be able to answer this yourself! The easiest way to get the most out of league tables is to break them down into their constituent parts, decide what aspects are most important to you, and then look into the data further.
- For instance, entry data can be very useful in seeing how far the university actually respects its entry standards. Some universities may set their entry standards quite low but take on a cohort who have actually performed very well in their A-Levels; whilst some may set high standards but take on many candidates who miss out. This will give you an excellent idea of which universities will be roughly in your range given the points total you’re predicted, and where you can expect to be in good academic company.
- Exit data can suggest good teaching or smart and attentive students. Again, check out unistats.com for a breakdown of performance – this provides the full panel data for those in every degree classification. Whilst you shoudn’t read too much into this – if you’re a smashing candidate, you should be able to get a first regardless of where you are – it can be very interesting to see how universities with similar entry standards churn out quite different classifications.
- Staff numbers and research scores can throw up a few departments you might not expect. For instance, there are some excellent RAE-rated departments in newer, more out-of-the-way universities – and they may have lower entry scores than their more traditional counterparts despite having a better reputation for teaching and research excellence, and a student-focussed experience.
What League Tables Don't Do
Important stuff league tables don’t cover
Whilst you can undoubtedly turn the information in league tables to your advantage, they don’t include everything that will be of use to a prospective undergraduate – often purely because it’s impossible to turn into a metric (quantifying the qualitative, again). Whilst there is an almost unlimited list of things that could be added to this section (how cheap is the student bar?) here I restrict myself to things related to how ‘good’ the university is likely to be for you.
- Resources – this is a concept not really adequately captured by student spend. For example, to scientists, one of the most important aspects will be great lab facilities. For those in the arts, humanities and social sciences, a well-stocked library where there isn’t massive competition for the most popular books will be vital. These are factors likely to make or break the student experience, but will probably require a visit to the universities you’re interested in to ascertain.
- Modules – how flexible is the course? How many a year are you expected to take? Are they things you’re interested in? There are enormous differences in how courses are structured – and, since courses are externally marked but not standardised (except when accredited), you may find some subjectively harder than others, depending on your strengths,
- Assessment methods can be massively important to how you find the course. Some universities assess modules 100% by exam, some by coursework, and most a mixture of the two. If you know in advance that you tend to enjoy, and do better in, one form of assessment over the other it is definitely worth your while asking departments how they examine modules.
How much should I worry about League Table position / Prestige?
Don’t lose any sleep over it. If you’re the type of person who likes to be the best at everything for the sake of pride then absolutely, make your decisions on the basis of a league table. However, for all the reasons stated above, this is unlikely to be a wise decision for anything other than bragging rights, since whether or not league tables actually reflect ‘the best’ in any meaningful sense is a very dubious point.
Taking the information provided in league tables can be very useful, but picking university number 2 over university number 4 simply because it is ‘better’ according to the Times or the Guardian is likely to be an utterly silly move. The differences between the top universities are so quantitatively small that where you are likely to be happy should be a far more important consideration to you when picking between similar universities.
Furthermore, something that is likely to be more important to you in your future career is your personal abilities. Whilst these can be shaped and moulded (and demonstrated) by your choice of degree, a good degree obtained by slavish and myopic attention or conversely total laziness probably won’t stand you in great stead when it comes to graduate recruitment processes, since these test your attitudes and abilities, not just your achievements. So try not to get too hung up about where your university falls in a league table – studying a subject you love, and doing well at it, will probably prove more important to your future career than choosing Nottingham over Leeds.
Will they affect my future options?
This is in many respects, a question for another guide. However, probably the most critical point is that 50% of graduate jobs are open to graduates of any university and any course. So, if you have a specific career in mind then by all means pick a degree and university to facilitate that; but if not, then obsessing over minor differences in graduate prospects probably isn’t that productive. In some circumstances you would be well advised to look at departmental prestige. If you wish to be a lawyer or banker then by all means aim for the top universities; if you plan to enter academia picking large, successful departments can be helpful. But apart from that your average employer is unlikely to pay the same attention to league tables that most TSRians do.
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