The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
RSS feeds: v0.91; v1.0 (RDF); v2.0; Atom.
9:49am on Saturday, 14th September, 2024:
Comment
Apparently, there are 122 universities in the UK. In The Guardian's latest rankings, Essex is at 23. We can now claim to be a top-23 university, as opposed to the top-30 university we were last year.
This is surprisingly high, given that we're not in the Russell Group. We're above the following Russell-Group members: York (25), Liverpool (27), King's College London (28), Manchester (31), Birmingham (36), Leeds (37), Queen's Belfast (43), Cardiff (46), Nottingham (62), Newcastle (63) and Queen Mary (74).
We're also just above Chichester (26), which I didn't even know had a university.
Compared to the universities that are normally considered our peers in the region, we're behind Surrey (19) but ahead of Reading (35), East Anglia (45), Kent (60) and Sussex (68), and very ahead of Brunel (120). Nationally, the only 1960s glass-and-concrete universities ranked higher than us that aren't in the Russell Group are Bath (7), Loughborough (10), Lancaster (11), Strathclyde (17), Surrey (19) and Aston (21). The other dozen or so are ranked lower.
As for why we're unexpectedly high, I have no idea. Looking at the breakdown by degree schemes, most of ours are well below 23rd. We're good at feedback and value-added (which means we take students with low entry qualifications and award them 1sts and 2:1s), but taking students with low entry qualifications reduces our average entry tariff and increases our staff/student ratio (because we shovel in so many applicants come clearing).
As for what all this means: it means nothing. Decision-makers use the Times Higher Education rankings, which back in May put us at equal 37th along with Dundee, Royal Holloway, Strathclyde and St George's (which merged with City University last month). There are 24 universities in the Russell Group, and they account for 23 of the THE's top 24 universities (Lancaster at 19 is the interloper; Queen's University Belfast at equal 26th is the outlier).
Nevertheless, you can perhaps guess which listing will be used in our publicity material.
Latest entries.
Archived entries.
About this blog.
Copyright © 2024 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).