​The Complete University Guide (CUG) and the Guardian have recently published their 2018 UK University League tables and Subject Tables. Highlights include:

• Edinburgh Napier is ranked 94th in the CUG and 83rd in the Guardian. Compared with other UK modern universities we are 33rd and 29th respectively;

• In the Guardian against other UK modern universities Edinburgh Napier is 7th for value added and 12th for Graduate prospects;

• We appear in the top-5 against other UK modern universities for Law (1st), Criminology (3rd), Music (3rd), Film (4th), Media (4th), Modern Languages (4th), Engineering (5th);

• Compared with all UK institutions Edinburgh Napier appears in the top-10 for Drama, Dance and Cinematics (4th) and Building (10th) and the top-quartile for Film Production & Photography, Law and Media & Film Studies.

Detailed briefings can be found here. 

But what do these rankings mean, and should we care?

At last count, there were 23 University league tables, each with their own unique method for ranking universities. It seems that in higher education we love to compare ourselves against other institutions as much as possible, especially if you think about the other measures of ranking there are, for example the National Student Survey, HESA Performance Indicators and REF. We do know that subject league tables are used by prospective students to make decisions on where to study.

UK rankings traditionally comprise a range of different quantitative measures of input, process and output including: entry standards, student satisfaction, student:staff ratio, academic services/facilities expenditure per student, research quality, proportion of 1sts/2:1s, completion rates, and student destinations. Different weights are given to each measure and these differ between league tables, although the biggest driver is usually student satisfaction.

Ranking methodologies have always been open to criticism due to the inherent arbitrary nature of weighting scores from different measures and then summing these to give an overall measure of ‘quality’. Some measures are also more controversial and open to bias, for example by institution size, subject, profile, location, than others.  In addition, league tables do not take into account performance in areas such as widening access, work-related learning and the wider student learning experience that Edinburgh Napier excels in.  

League table ranking methodology is complex.  Planning and Business Intelligence is leading on work to ensure that data that feeds into league tables are optimised for league table performance, working with colleagues from Finance, HR and IS.

It is clear our love affair with rankings is not going to go away. Indeed, it is likely that Universities will be ranked by external organisations even more, particularly with Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) results released next month*. Therefore, while some of the methodologies may be open to criticism, they are something that we must continue to be aware of and ultimately we must focus efforts on improving our scores to ensure that we remain attractive to students.

Andrew Quickfall
Head of Planning and Business Intelligence