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Anonymous #1

Should I choose middlesex or Oxford brookes?

Reply 1

DataVenia

Volunteer Team, Clearing and Applications Advisor

Original post by Anonymous

Should I choose middlesex or Oxford brookes?

For what subject?

What aspects of the course, university, location, etc. are important to you?

Reply 2

Anonymous #1

Original post by DataVenia

For what subject?
What aspects of the course, university, location, etc. are important to you?

I will be studying Law. Middlesex uni is close to my dad’s house and brookes is close to my mum’s house. However, my mental health cant be living with my mum as i cant really focus on my studies. She is great but I really wanna be somewhere else but I also looked at the uni rankings and Middlesex is doing bad, unlike brookes

Reply 3

DataVenia

Volunteer Team, Clearing and Applications Advisor

Original post by Anonymous

University rankings are only useful if (a) you know what metrics they've used, and (b) those metrics are important to you.

On the Complete University Guide 2025, for example Oxford Brookes is ranked 52nd (down 5 from last year) for Law compared to Middlesex's 85th (up 7 from last year). The factors which they've taken into account are:

Entry standards: the average UCAS points of new undergraduates (using data from 2021-22).
Oxford Brookes is 112 (BBC); Middlesex is 104 (BCC). Would you really pick Oxford Brookes over Middlesex because, on average, new undergraduates got one grade higher in one of there A level subjects two or three three years ago? Is that really a factor which is important to you?

Student satisfaction: a weighted average of the first 24 questions on last year's National Students Survey.
Oxford Brooke gets 72%; Middlesex gets 76%. So, on average, those graduates from last year who completed the survey slightly preferred Middlesex.

Research quality: The number of teaching staff eligible to be submitted to the Research Excellence Framework (2019-20) multiplied by the proportion actually submitted and divided by the total number of teaching staff.
Oxford Brookes gets 2.86; Middlesex get 2.54. This is really just measuring (in a roundabout way) how much Law research goes on at the university. Is that important to you? Or are you more interested in the quality of teaching?

Continuation: A measure of the proportion of students who continue into the second year (i.e. don't drop out).
Oxford Brookes gets 95.6%; Middlesex gets 90.2%. What this data doesn't should you obviously is why those extra 5% of students dropped out. Given that this data is from 2020-21 and 2021-22 it's likely to be heavily impacted by how each university handled Covid. Is that really relevant to you now?

Graduate prospects - outcomes: The proportion of students working or in further study fifteen months after graduating (using 2020-21 data).
Oxford Brookes gets 82%; Middlesex gets 74%. See below.

Graduate prospects - on track: The proportion of graduates who agree that their activity is on track with their future plans (using 2020-21 data).
Oxford Brookes gets 74%; Middlesex gets 63%. See below.

For graduate prospect data, I prefer the more detailed information presented on The Uni Guide (see here for Oxford Brooke and here for Middlesex, then scroll down to the "What are graduates doing after six months?" and "What about your long term prospects?" sections). This data paints a somewhat different picture. It shows that of the Oxford Brookes Law graduate who were employed six months after graduating, only 33% were in the legal profession (the next highest percentage work in sales/marketing). However 45% of Middlesex Law graduates were in the legal profession (either legal professionals or legal associate professionals).

There's lot of other information which is available - but it depends what important to you, not what's important to whoever compiled a particular league table. By picking apart the above, I'm not trying to steer you in one direction or another. I'm simply trying to point out that league tables can be very misleading and really aren't as important or useful as some people seem to think.

Above I asked, "What aspects of the course, university, location, etc. are important to you?" You immediately talked about the proximity to each of your parents and league tables. Hopefully the above has shown that you need to treat league tables carefully. Not unlike the relationship with your parents! :smile: