League tables of British universities

Three national rankings of universities in the United Kingdom are published annually – by The Complete University Guide, The Guardian and jointly by The Times and The Sunday Times. Rankings have also been produced in the past by The Daily Telegraph and Financial Times.

The primary aim of the rankings is to inform potential undergraduate applicants about UK universities based on a range of criteria, including entry standards, student satisfaction, staff/student ratio, academic services and facilities expenditure per student, research quality, proportion of Firsts and 2:1s, completion rates and student destinations. All of the league tables also rank universities on their strength in individual subjects.

Each year since 2008, Times Higher Education has compiled a "Table of Tables" to combine the results of the 3 mainstream league tables. In the 2017 table, the top 5 universities were the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of St Andrews, Imperial College London and Durham University. The top 5 universities in a 2009 ranking of British universities by national reputation were Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, LSE and St Andrews, while in a companion international reputation ranking, the top 5 British universities were Cambridge, Oxford, UCL, Imperial and Manchester. The top five universities in a 2015 ranking of institutes that produce the country's most employable graduates in a survey of recruiters from major UK companies in the business, IT and engineering sectors were Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, Manchester and King's College London. The five universities with the highest average UCAS tariff scores for undergraduates starting in 2015-16 were Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, LSE and St Andrews.

The following rankings of British universities are produced annually:

The Complete University Guide is compiled by Mayfield University Consultants (which had previously compiled university rankings for The Times). It was published for the first time in The Daily Telegraph in 2007, when it was known as The Good University Guide, and was produced in association with The Independent from 2008 to 2011.

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