Oxford University has vaulted into top place in the Guardian’s annual universities guide for the first time in a decade, thanks to new employment data showing that more Oxford students are moving into graduate-level jobs after completing their studies.
This year’s Guardian university guide sees Oxford moving up from third to first, while the University of St Andrews stays in second place and Oxford’s ancient rival Cambridge drops to third after occupying the top spot for nine years.
Several other universities improved their performance in the rankings thanks to the new graduate jobs data.
London School of Economics was joint second place with Oxford and Cambridge for graduate jobs, enabling it to leap to fifth place overall from 19th, and re-enter the top 10 for the first time since 2015. LSE’s improvement was helped by high demand for graduates in economics and law, two of its major subject areas.
It was boosted further by higher ratings from its own students, who gave LSE improved scores for course satisfaction, assessment and teaching, where it had previously lagged behind its rivals.
The University of Brighton was also helped by a big improvement in its graduate jobs score, lifting it 12 places to reach 102nd.
At the other end of the scale, De Montfort University saw a fall in its graduate jobs score, contributing to its tumble from 61st to 119th place overall.
The results comes as British universities are becoming cautiously optimistic that most have avoided the worst scenarios anticipated following the worldwide coronavirus outbreak and the exam grading turmoil that engulfed UK schools.
Several institutions have said that student recruitment has held up across the board, with few domestic students opting to defer their studies, while international students numbers appear not to have fallen as feared.
Louise Richardson, Oxford’s vice-chancellor, said her institution was on course to admit a record number of state school-educated pupils from the UK after it decided to honour offers made to applicants affected by the exams fiasco.
Oxford’s provisional figures show that around 68% of its domestic intake will come from state schools this year, a rise of six percentage points from 2019. The university expects to enrol 350 more undergraduates than its normal intake, in order to offer as many places as possible.
Richardson says she expects any knock-on effects on next year’s applicants to be small.
“Necessarily, there will be fewer places next year than we have this year, because we have taken far more than we anticipated. We will do our level best to take as many as possible next year,” Richardson said.
“I think we will manage it in such a way that the numbers will be so small, in any given subject, that it will not be felt by anyone.”
Cambridge said it has also expanded its undergraduate numbers by 10% as a result of the exam fiasco, and that 70% of its new UK undergraduates were educated at state schools. It said none of its students would need to defer for a year.
Last year St Andrews was the first university to split up the Oxbridge duopoly at the top of the table, and did so again this year, retaining its second place overall.
Sally Mapstone, St Andrews’s principal, said: “This ranking is significant because it comes at a difficult period for students across the country who have experienced a year like no other, and are facing a very different university experience.
“It’s so important that while we encourage students to observe safe behaviour, we empower and support them to show what they can do during these enormously restrictive times.”
The Guardian university guide is the first league table to use new data which gauges graduate jobs 15 months after graduation rather than after six months, and is thought to more accurately capture graduate employability.
The data is collected centrally by the Higher Education Statistics Agency, rather than by individual universities, to address concerns that universities were gaming their performance by mis-classifying their graduates’ occupations or offering them temporary employment during the survey period.
Imperial scored highest for graduate outcomes overall, but slipped from seventh to ninth place due to recruiting students with lower grades. King’s College London soared from 63rd to 42nd place after rising from 21st to fifth in the new graduate jobs data.
In individual subject rankings, Anglia Ruskin topped the table in two areas, sport science and education, while being ranked 80th overall. Bournemouth rose 10 places to claim the top spot in social work, again thanks to the new graduate job data.
Matt Hiely-Rayner, who compiled the tables, said Oxford overtook Cambridge after a decade because the new job data erased Cambridge’s lead: “With Cambridge’s advantage for career prospects eliminated, Oxford’s advantage in the value-added metrics shines through to elevate the university to top spot,” he said.
Oxford also overtook Cambridge in subject rankingsfor law, history and modern languages.
Richardson said the strong value-added performance by Oxford was a credit to its students and to the university’s dynamic selection process.
“The socioeconomic and ethnic diversity of our undergraduate student body has been transformed over the past five years, and we see this as a terrific success. We are very proud of our achievement here,” Richardson said.
• This article was amended on 29 September 2020 because an earlier version said that Oxford overtook Cambridge “in a number of subject rankings, including English, law, physics and economics”. This has been corrected to say in subject rankings for law, history and modern languages.
