Getting a good job after university is vital to cover the ever-growing costs of a degree. But the chances of achieving that goal vary enormously according to where you study.

It pays – literally – to know the difference that can be made to your job prospects just by the university you attend. At Imperial College London, 96.5% of graduates are in high-skilled employment within 15 months of leaving. They are also earning £39,000 on average. Both performances are the best in the UK. The university, which also tops our overall ranking, specialises in science, technology, engineering and medicine – all areas where there is national demand for high-quality graduates. 

At the other end of the scale, there are five universities where less than half of graduates are in high-skilled jobs, with those from Bath Spa and Buckinghamshire New having the least success in the market (just 47.6% at each are in graduate-level employment).

And the costs of going to university are only rising. This year’s entrants will be the first to pay more than £30,000 in tuition fees, while at the same time the number of graduates landing high-skilled jobs is falling.

When this guide was first published in 2023, 74.8% of graduates from the universities featured within it gained these plum jobs in proportion to their education and qualifications. Three years on, that number has fallen to 71.1%, leaving several thousand graduates in jobs they could just as easily have got without a degree – and without student loan debts that average close to £50,000.

The decline has come as the country’s economy falters, with employers taking on fewer new staff and larger ones shrinking their graduate trainee programmes all while weighing up the impact of artificial intelligence.

This year’s The Graduate Market in 2026 report, by the respected High Fliers research organisation, struck an equally pessimistic note: ‘The latest assessment of employers’ recruitment plans shows that confidence remains low and recruitment targets at many organisations are continuing to be reviewed and reduced.’

But the picture is not all bleak. Data compiled for the Daily Mail, which you can find in our University Finder, identifies the institutions where graduates remain in demand, continue to earn good salaries and where recent students believe their careers to be on track.

Our guide is the only one to use three measures to assess how well students are prepared for the working world. Graduate employment indicators account for one quarter of universities’ overall rankings, while our University Finder can single out the performance and ranking of each university on the three indicators collectively or individually using our unique ‘create your own league table’ function.

The rankings identify several universities – and not just the biggest names – where high-skilled graduate employment is the norm. Cumbria (86.5%, 4th in the UK), Worcester (79.8%, 11th and our University of the Year for Graduate Jobs), Derby (77.6%, 17th), Robert Gordon, in Aberdeen (77.3%, 19th) and Teesside (77.1%, 21st).

These universities are getting bigger proportions of graduates into top jobs than some members of the Russell Group of research-led universities, which are among the hardest universities to get into. At Liverpool, the lowest ranked of the Russell Group for jobs, 73.8% of graduates are in high-skilled work.

Read the full graduate jobs ranking below or launch our interactive University Finder – and personalise the rankings to find the university best suited to you. Or, you can also search the best universities by subject.

1. Imperial College London – 96.5%

Overview

Imperial is in its usual place at the top of our rankings once again – for the fourth successive year – after nearly doubling its lead over the university in second place. It is not just the top institution in the UK by our reckoning but indisputably one of the top in the world for studying science, technology, engineering, maths, medicine and business – what Imperial likes to call STEMMB. Almost half the undergraduate intake in September 2025, when the number of applications hit a record high, was recruited from abroad. The university combines this academic excellence with a social conscience that puts other highly selective institutions in the shade. Bursaries of £1,000 a year extend to students from homes with residual annual incomes of up to £70,000, rising to £5,500 according to need and background. Efforts to ensure those admitted from under-represented backgrounds stay the course and achieve as well as their more advantaged peers are exceptional. Students are highly engaged while here, with 11,000 undergraduates involved in at least one of the 400 societies run by the students’ union, and highly in demand when they graduate, commanding the highest salaries and with the largest proportion in high-skilled jobs. The university is centred on a campus in South Kensington, opposite Hyde Park, with medical students based in three central London hospitals – St Mary’s, Charing Cross and Hammersmith – with another campus at White City. Three new degrees (a relatively rare thing at Imperial) will admit their first students in September 2027 – an MSci in medical science and innovation, and a choice of a BEng or MEng in maths and computer science for AI. Evidence, should any be needed, that Imperial is not going to surrender its position at the cutting edge of human knowledge any time soon. 

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2. London School of Economics and Political Science – 89.6%

Overview

By some distance, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is the hardest UK university to get into in the UK, with more than 14 applications for every place. Competition comes from across the world, too, with more than 55% of applications and admissions in September 2025 from abroad. And applications have never been higher. Only Imperial College London sees more graduates in high-skilled jobs or paid more money. LSE offers a narrow range of subjects, focused on the social sciences but with significant numbers of maths, business and law students too. Where other universities seem intent on shutting down debate on controversial subjects, all LSE students now take a course in ‘dialogue essentials for today’s world’ to develop communication skills to help them think critically while studying and to thrive at work afterwards. ‘This includes listening, communicating and engaging with those around them – especially when opinions and views may differ,’ the university told us. As well as free-thinkers, LSE encourages those who want to run their own businesses. LSE Generate, the university’s centre for entrepreneurship, was recently recognised by the Financial Times as the top university start-up hub in the UK. This took account of the views of investors, entrepreneurs and academics, as well as the success rate of those graduating from contending hubs. Despite fierce competition for places, LSE achieves good levels of diversity in its student population. Just over one quarter of the student intake are the first in their family to attend university – considerably ahead of Oxford and Cambridge. The university quarter, a largely pedestrianised precinct just off the West End, has had huge investment in recent years and more new buildings will open in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Aldwych this year and next.

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3. University of Cambridge – 87.9%

Overview

If you come from a school, region, or background that sends few students to Cambridge, now could be a good time to apply. It is having another push on diversifying its intake with a new widening participation campaign. The aim is to draw more applications from schools, ethnicities, economically disadvantaged groups and regions and places in the country from where few apply and get into Cambridge and Oxford. This campaign builds on the words of vice chancellor Prof Deborah Prentice, who has said she wants to water down the London and South East bias in admissions. ‘We want to attract the best talent and the brightest minds wherever they are, and whatever their backgrounds,’ she said. Already, state school admissions have climbed to account for 72.5% of the intake in September 2025 (well above Oxford’s 66.5%), with 35.8% drawn from ethnic minorities. You will still need good grades to get in – typically with one or two A* grades at A-level – unless you are accepted on to the foundation year in arts, humanities and social sciences pre-degree programme (for which you will need 120 UCAS points, equivalent to BBB at A-level). For those who get a place, the prize is one of the best higher educations anywhere in the world with levels of personal supervision unheard of in most universities. Facilities are world-class and teaching is conducted largely by the people who write the textbooks. Students are admitted to one of 29 undergraduate colleges, offering very different styles and experiences. Visiting ahead of applying is essential and an early application is required with an October 15 deadline. 

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4. University of Cumbria – 86.5%

Overview

Cumbria is among the biggest providers of degree apprenticeships in the UK, with 2,300 currently enrolled – a number that is expected to rise further by September 2027. Programmes are many and varied, spanning professional forester to paramedic, digital user experience professional to youth worker. Apprenticeships form an important part of the university’s mission in a region that is underserved for higher education. Its wider employment track record is among the best with more than 85% of graduates landing high-skilled jobs, according to the latest Graduate Outcomes survey. Cumbria is well aware of its strategic importance, proclaiming itself to be ‘for and from Cumbria and our localities, rooted in and serving our communities, with people, place and partnership at our heart’. Applications for September 2025 admission hit a ten-year low, although student recruitment was up 10%. The opening of the Citadels campus in Carlisle in September 2028 will be a further boost for an institution with a true regional footprint. The £80m development is being largely bankrolled by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and is a cornerstone of the redevelopment of central Carlisle. There are further sites in Barrow-in-Furness (opened in September 2025 with a range of courses including options designed to serve the town’s defence industry), Ambleside, Lancaster and London, the latter offering a suite of business, education and health programmes. A graduate-entry medical school – The Pears Cumbria School of Medicine – admitted its first students in September 2025. Developed in partnership with the world-class medical school of Imperial College London, and with substantial financial backing from the Pears Foundation, it is based in Carlisle. New degrees recruiting for September 2027 include accounting and finance, outdoor education and leadership, security intelligence and cyber, all offered with or without a foundation year.

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5. University of Oxford – 85.2%

Overview

The King officially opened the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in July, bankrolled by Oxford’s largest ever philanthropic donation (£185m from American billionaire Stephen A Schwarzman). The centre is home to seven humanities faculties and research institutes and has an Institute for Ethics in AI as well as a new Bodleian Humanities Library, a 500-seat concert hall, a theatre, a cinema, exhibition space and a dedicated schools’ outreach space. A Global Health Building is nearly completed on the Old Road Campus, which will unite the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health with the Oxford Population Health department to strengthen work tackling disease and delivering healthcare. Students’ sporting and general wellbeing has been enhanced by renovations to the Sir Roger Bannister Iffley Road running track, scene of the first sub-four-minute mile. Places are highly prized; there are more than ten applications for every spot in the most popular subjects, which include economics and management, computer science, biomedical sciences, mathematics and law. These are not just any old applications either; 47.1% of students admitted in September 2025 got A*A*A* or better at A-level and 87.2% received A*AA or better. But get through the admissions process – which features interviews and aptitude tests – and you are likely to get a very achievable offer of AAA at A-level. Admissions have diversified significantly in recent years. The proportion of black and minority ethnic students grew from 24.6% to 30% between 2021 and 2025, although the number educated in state schools has dipped a little and now stands at 66.5% (well behind Cambridge). There are 32 undergraduate colleges, and not all subjects are available in each. They offer very different social and educational mixes too, so it pays to choose carefully. The deadline for application (October 15) is earlier than other universities.

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6. University of Bath – 84.9%

Overview

A seventh successive rise in applications, which crested 40,000 for the first time in 2025, speaks volumes about the reputation that Bath has built in the past 60 years. Indeed, for bright applicants in search of a good return on their higher education investment in the form of a high-skill graduate job paying a decent salary afterwards, Bath is hard to beat. The university ranks in the top ten on all three of our graduate employment measures. Shortlisted for our University of the Year award last year, Bath nurtures its success in the graduate jobs market through a work placement/study abroad year programme from which two thirds of students benefit. Despite much recent development, the university’s 1960s origins are still visible on its Claverton Down campus, sitting on a hillside just outside the Roman city. The campus combines academic, social, residential and sporting facilities, although many students live off campus in Bath itself. The university is best known for its engineering, science and business degrees but also has a thriving arts scene and is one of the big hitters in inter-university sport – for which facilities are fantastic. The site of British Bobsleigh and Skeleton Association training facilities, Bath enjoyed an outstanding Winter Olympics at Milano Cortina 2026 as Matt Weston’s double gold in men’s and mixed skeleton (the latter with Tabitha Stoecker) earned Team GB unprecedented success. The university fares well in warmer sports too, with Team Bath a consistent top ten finisher in British Universities and Colleges Sport rankings. Sports facilities have been upgraded in the past year, meaning Bath now has the UK’s first fully recyclable all-weather 3G pitch. For those in need of a calmer space, there is the Woodland Lounge, a neuroinclusive space with a carefully managed sensory environment.

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7. University of Warwick – 83.6%

Overview

Getting into Warwick just got a whole lot easier, as the university became the latest member of the Russell Group to address the financial crisis in higher education by recruiting 1,300 more students – 1,200 of them from the UK – than they did in the previous year for courses starting in September 2025. This record intake drops the competition for places from 7.5:1 to 6.3:1 at a stroke, with the vast majority of the extra students recruited from the UK. Good news for those seeking a place at one of the great success stories among the generation of universities founded in the 1960s. The green campus on the outskirts of Coventry (yes, Coventry, not Warwick) has academic, social, sporting and residential facilities cheek by jowl. Popular with employers, graduates are the fourth-most in demand with top recruiters, according to High Fliers’ latest The Graduate Market research. Warwick is unusual among Russell Group universities in also having a strong presence in the degree apprenticeships market, with close to 1,400 students following ten programmes from advanced clinical care practitioner to electro-mechanical engineering, and more in the offing. Work is progressing on Warwick’s STEM Connect and Social Science Connect programmes, the biggest investment in the university’s history that cost £700m, which has a new social sciences and STEM research facility at its heart, with plenty of inter-disciplinary collaboration and community spaces incorporated. Already-excellent sports facilities are also being beefed up, with six new padel courts under construction. Three accommodation blocks – part of Warwick’s 7,000 residential places – will undergo a major refurbishment in time for the arrival of the September 2027 intake. And work is ongoing to reduce the university’s carbon footprint, with the aim of heat pump technology replacing natural gas as the main heating source on campus.

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8. University College London – 81.3%

Overview

University College London (UCL) is expanding fast. Applications in September 2025 were up 14.5% on the previous year and up 63.7% on 2019. Admissions surged by 25.8% from 2024, with only one university admitting more than UCL’s 11,470 students last September. It increased the number of international students hugely; they now account for 60% of all applications and admissions, only adding to the cosmopolitan student experience at the heart of the capital. With more than 400 undergraduate courses (and 700 at postgraduate level) academic excellence spans the arts, sciences, engineering, medicine and social sciences. After opening its UCL East campus in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, in Stratford, recent investment has focused on its original base in Bloomsbury. Renovations completed earlier this year on the Main Quad and Wilkins Building created spaces for events, conferences, exhibitions and other student activities. Those studying here are doers rather than spectators. The university’s Student Life Strategy focuses on the value of the student experience outside of classrooms and laboratories, prompting recent expansion of co-curricular and extracurricular activities in six areas, including sports, the arts and volunteering. About 60% of all students are engaged with extracurricular activities through the students’ union. Like its near neighbour the London School of Economics, UCL is seeking to instil greater levels of tolerance in its students for diverse opinions than seen on many campuses. Its Disagreeing Well campaign launched this year equips students to engage with people of differing viewpoints through a skills video series, learning resources, events and a student-hosted podcast. The university, which is celebrating its 200th anniversary in 2026, also seeks social diversity in its student intake, with just over one in five receiving a lowered contextual offer despite strong competition for places.

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9. University of Nottingham – 80.6%

Overview

Nottingham is the latest university to find itself engulfed in the financial storm hitting universities of all calibres. In May, it announced it would be seeking more than 600 redundancies from academic and support staff roles, putting 2,700 staff at risk, to avoid running out of money by 2031. Cuts on this scale will have to impact courses and student experience at some level, a great shame at a university that is currently so popular with graduate employers. Nottingham is the third most-targeted university by leading graduate employers, according to High Fliers’ 2026 Graduate Market report – a position it holds for the second successive year. This leads to some of the highest graduate salaries. The university is headquartered at University Park, just outside the centre of Nottingham, where academic, residential and social facilities are easily absorbed within the 300 acres of landscaped grounds. It has several more sites in and around the city, including the Jubilee campus a short distance away which is home to business, education and computer science, and a campus specialising in bioscience and veterinary medicine at Sutton Bonington, 12 miles outside of the city. The university has great strength in engineering, medicine and many other academic disciplines; also in sport where Nottingham has been the top university for team sports for the past six years. The David Ross Sports Village has transformed indoor facilities in the past decade and a new first team rugby pitch was opened last year at the nearby outdoor Highfields Sports Complex. In an era where more students are going to university close to home, Nottingham is becoming a rare beast with strong recruitment across middle and southern England. But how the financial uncertainty affects that student pipeline in the next two years remains to be seen.

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 10. Loughborough University – 79.9%

Overview

With the best sports facilities of any university on this side of the Atlantic, Loughborough remains the team to beat on university pitches, in swimming pools and in sports halls and arenas across the country. It has topped the men’s and women’s inter-university championships for 45 years consecutively. While it would never win any prizes for architectural beauty, Loughborough’s 523-acre campus in this small East Midlands town offers outstanding opportunities to the most talented sportsmen and women emerging from our schools. More than 6,300 students live on campus, creating a close-knit sporty community. The university is an academic heavyweight too, with an exceptional reputation in engineering and art and design, in particular, and a strong reputation across the board evidenced by its excellent showing in our subject tables. It has among the very best graduate employment rates, with the vast majority landing high-skilled jobs with salaries to match – and the university intends to keep it that way, even as the graduate jobs market contracts significantly. Loughborough told us there has been a ‘deliberate shift towards digitally enabled, interdisciplinary and employment-focused education’. This manifests itself in its £5.8m Digilabs project, supporting teaching in AI, simulation and modelling, extended reality learning, robotics and 3D data capture, while embedding industry-relevant digital skills across a range of undergraduate courses. Separately, STEMLab offers further hands-on practical experience. It brings together engineering, chemistry, materials, biosciences and physics in shared teaching and laboratory spaces, enabling students from multiple disciplines to collaborate using industry-standard equipment. Loughborough is offering law degrees for the first time from September this year, and has introduced further programmes in computing and cybersecurity, the latter being areas where graduates remain in strong demand.

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11. University of Worcester – 79.8%

Overview

Worcester is our University of the Year for Graduate Jobs with a record for that puts many of the Russell Group in the shade. Four in every five students gain a high-skilled job when they leave, ranking Worcester just outside the UK top ten. It is a remarkable achievement and due reward for targeted and consistent investment in facilities, particularly the Severn Campus for Health and Wellbeing. It has transformed the fortunes of this mid-sized university in the pretty cathedral city of Worcester. The Duke’s Building (opened in April by the Duke of Gloucester) at the heart of the Severn Campus is the latest new-build containing clinical skills rooms and sport and exercise science laboratories alongside other facilities. Worcester has been awarded £2.5m by the Office for Students to add simulation facilities for its growing number of healthcare students. These include a midwifery simulation suite; a decommissioned ambulance; and simulation rooms to bring together healthcare students practising interprofessional working from A&E departments to operating theatres. Just under half of undergraduates study in the School of Nursing and Midwifery and the School of Health and Wellbeing. There is also a large body of primary and secondary teacher trainees for whom provision was rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted in 2023. The Severn Campus, which houses the graduate-entry Three Counties Medical School, is one of four sites in the city, with a new West Midlands nursing and healthcare outpost in Dudley. Almost three quarters of UK undergraduates are drawn from the immediate region, with applications at a seven-year high for September 2025. So, the secret is out. There are large numbers of mature students and those whose parents did not go to university. Sports facilities are excellent, topped by the 2,000-seat Worcester Arena – one of the UK’s leading venues for wheelchair basketball.

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12. Durham University – 79.7%

Overview

Durham is one of the UK’s fastest-growing universities, with UK admissions increasing by more than 50% in the past two years. Applications in September 2025 were up by a more modest 9.5% compared to two years before, all of which has cut competition for places from more than 7:1 in 2023 closer to 5.5:1 now. Set in a pretty – but small – cathedral city, the university has long been a plum destination. Particularly so in London and the South East, from which 37% of admissions came last year with a similar proportion drawn from private schools. Durham is striving to diversify this intake, with several scholarships reserved for students from the North East. Its Next Gen Durham and Destination Durham initiatives work with local secondary school children to boost applications, while the Asian Access Pilot is designed to generate more from children of Asian heritage in areas with low take-up of higher education. Undergraduates are allocated to one of 16 colleges, which are social rather than academic groupings. They are grouped in two locations: the modern Hill colleges to the south of the city centre, and the Bailey colleges located in largely historic premises in the centre, with University College in Durham Castle the most sought-after destination. Trevelyan, one of the Hill colleges, has just had a major refurbishment of several of its distinctive hexagonal accommodation blocks, and a £1m project has upgraded audio-visual equipment and refurbished multiple teaching rooms across the university. A similar sum has been spent remodelling laboratories in the department of biosciences. Durham’s well-respected Business School moved to new riverside premises two years ago. The university is a strong all-rounder, with the arts, sciences and social sciences to the fore and its graduates fare well in the jobs market even in today’s straitened times.

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13. University of St Andrews – 79.1%

Overview

St Andrews is one of the most competitive universities to get into – and it is the only one in that select cohort to have consistently delivered teaching rated as outstanding by academically demanding students over the past two decades. It wins our University of the Year for Teaching Excellence award this year in recognition of this achievement and another stellar set of results in the National Student Survey (NSS). It delivers high quality teaching, outstanding student support and a great university experience – with NSS outcomes that are the envy of every other leading academic institution. It is one of the most sought-after destinations in global higher education for good reason. Founded more than six centuries ago, St Andrews is the third-oldest university in the English-speaking world, and its Making Waves philanthropic campaign is helping position the university for another 600 years. The £300m initiative aims to develop infrastructure, research capabilities and student support systems (the latter already among the best there are). A central plank of the campaign is to widen the institution’s accessibility through increased funding for scholarships and bursaries. It is part-funding New College, due to open in 2027 and the first college to be built in St Andrews in 300 years, which will house the university’s new Business School and School of International Relations. It is also supporting the Digital Nexus building at the heart of St Andrews’ science and medicine facilities. The new development will provide collaborative research spaces designed to help tackle global challenges such as climate change and dementia. St Andrews offers a genuine alternative to Oxbridge for the brightest students and it has one of the strongest performances of any university in our subject tables, with academic excellence embedded across the curriculum.

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14. King’s College London – 78.8%

Overview

King’s College London is our University of the Year for Social Inclusion, showing that it is possible to be a top ten university and have an outstandingly diverse intake. The student population is among the most socially and ethnically diverse in the Russell Group of research-led universities. They also achieve well, with some of the highest graduate salaries and a very high proportion landing high-skill jobs. Many study medicine, dentistry and healthcare across three teaching hospitals – Guy’s, St Thomas’ and King’s College Hospital. King’s is also famed for its social science, law, history, science and engineering provision. It is preparing students for the future, tackling the big issues of today – and growing exponentially in popularity. Applications have surged by 73% since 2017, with more than 75,000 jostling for a place in September 2025. The university responded by accepting an additional 600 students. New science and chemistry laboratories across the Strand and Waterloo campuses are part of a £45.5m investment in scientific infrastructure. The £65m Pears Maudsley Centre for Children and Young People is due to fully open in 2027, with students working alongside world-leading clinicians and researchers tackling the global youth mental health crisis. The Dickson Poon School of Law has launched the first AI literacy programme for law students and staff, giving hands-on access to legal AI tools alongside guidance on responsible and effective use. This is one of several instances where AI tools and training are being integrated into teaching and real-world projects across a range of courses to prepare students for an AI-driven future. In their downtime, September 2027’s student intake will be able to enjoy the redeveloped Bush House South West Wing on the Strand campus. This student-focused upgrade will offer a centre through which to access support alongside social and modern study areas. 

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15. University of Birmingham – 78.4%

Overview

Birmingham is our University of the Year. In a world where having a degree no longer guarantees a good job, Birmingham graduates remain in considerable demand. After two years when it topped the bill, this year the university’s students sit second in the UK for popularity with the leading graduate employers, according to respected High Fliers research. Close to 80% of graduates land high-skilled jobs with salaries in excess of £31,000 on average. When our ranking measures are taken together, Birmingham’s all-round strength has lifted it seven places in this year’s Daily Mail ranking to sit 13th, by far the biggest upward move of any university in the elite top 20. Although not immune from the cuts that have affected most universities in the past three years, heavy investment continues across Birmingham as part of its Campus Vision 2045. The Birmingham Centre for Anatomy, Surgical and Clinical Skills is due to open soon on the Birmingham Health Innovation Campus, close to the medical school and the Edgbaston mothership. This will offer students immersive learning in simulated environments such as mock hospital wards, consulting rooms and an operating theatre. The university is constantly investing in technology to enhance its digital learning environments, and all students can take a year in computer science within their degree in response to demand from students, employers and the government for more computing education. Modules in AI and machine learning, and data structure, algorithms and databases are among those built into the year. A redbrick university (so called because of the architecture of its original buildings), Birmingham is also a member of the research-led Russell Group. Already one of the UK’s largest institutions, Birmingham’s popularity continues to grow with a substantial 11% application rise in September 2025, pushing the total beyond 60,000 for the first time.

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16. University of Surrey – 78%

Overview

Surrey wins our University of the Year for Student Experience award after its students gave the institution a ringing endorsement in this year’s National Student Survey. Our analysis placed Surrey 4th for student experience but it was by far the largest institution to score so highly, making its achievement all the more notable. Campus life is enhanced by great social facilities, over 6,000 student rooms, the Surrey Sports Park and academic and student life support centres on both Guildford campuses. All are a big draw for students, who were admitted in record numbers for the second successive year in September 2025. In addition to the heavy recent investment, applicants are attracted by updates to the course portfolio to include significant subjects – including medicine (graduate entry only) and veterinary medicine – and a graduate employment record that bests many of the Russell Group. Surrey intends to keep its graduates in demand with its recently published AI in Education framework. This will have discipline and course-specific AI modules embedded into every course from September this year. Meanwhile, assessments are being transformed to ‘safeguard genuine knowledge, skills and independent thinking’. By inviting AI into the university selectively, Surrey hopes to give graduates technical capability as well as critical judgement and responsibility. Other developments include the Surrey Space Institute, which builds on long-standing niche excellence in satellite technology. It brings together research, innovation and industry partnerships to deliver highly employable graduates for a key national growth area. The university is more diverse than its leafy location might suggest. Around one third of students have parents who did not attend university, and just under half of last year’s intake were from ethnic minorities. Bursaries and scholarships are rather limited but some accommodation is among the cheapest in the UK, starting at £89.50 per week.

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17. University of Derby – 77.6%

Overview

Based on four sites in Derby with a healthcare campus in nearby Chesterfield, the university comfortably outperforms its overall ranking in our league table in two key areas of student interest – the jobs they get on leaving and their experience satisfaction. The university turns in consistently excellent scores in the National Student Survey, particularly for ratings on teaching quality and student support. Derby also punches well above its weight in the graduate jobs market – the product of extensive partnerships with industry, exemplified by flagship tie-ups with the likes of Rolls-Royce (a key local employer), McDonald’s, the NHS and the InterContinental Exchange (ICE, the owners of the New York Stock Exchange). The university’s Institute of Carbonomics, for example, was born out of the partnerships with ICE and McDonald’s and puts Derby on the map for driving innovation in carbon economics and delivering real-world carbon reduction at scale. The Chancellor’s Entrepreneurs’ Club has been established by the university’s chancellor, Lord Burlington, and co-led by Theo Paphitis, one of the dragons in Dragons’ Den and the entrepreneur behind High Street businesses such as Boux Avenue and Ryman. The club gives students the chance to collaborate with successful business leaders, tackle real projects and pitch ideas to expert mentors. Careers support is integrated throughout the curriculum, which includes working on real-world projects to enhance employability and equip students for the working world. Derby is also one of the largest providers of earn-while-you-learn degree apprenticeships in the country, with around 2,000 apprentice learners enrolled.

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18. University of Dundee – 77.5%

Overview

It is a remarkable tribute to the esteem in which a higher education from the University of Dundee is held that applications for admission in September 2025 actually rose by 2.2% even as the university wrestled with an existential funding crisis unparalleled in UK higher education. It continues to need outside help to keep afloat, with the Scottish Government funding a £40m cash bailout for 2025-26 and 2026-27 as the university seeks to put itself back on a sustainable financial footing. This comes on top of a cash injection of £22m from the Scottish Funding Council in March 2025, needed after the discovery of a £35m hole in the university’s finances caused by a collapse in international student numbers plus serious management failings. The crisis is not over and after hundreds of redundancies the threat of more to balance the books is raising questions about the potential impact on delivery of courses. The university has streamlined its administration, moving from a schools-based structure to one made up of four faculties: arts and social sciences; health; life sciences; and science, engineering and business. Amid the reorganisation, the university is introducing from September 2026 a new MA in community development and youth work and a new BDes in experience design. Dundee was named our Scottish University of the Year in September 2024 for its outstanding reputation – notably in medicine, life sciences and art and design – since gaining independence from the University of St Andrews in 1967. It continues to excel in these areas with, for example, the recent expansion of simulation-based laparoscopic, robotic and endoscopic teaching for medical students at Ninewells Hospital, showing a continued effort to innovate.

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19. Robert Gordon University – 77.3%

Overview

Robert Gordon University (RGU) is the smart choice for students performing a cost/benefit analysis before starting higher education. Through the Aberdeen oil and gas boom years and now well out the other side, RGU has maintained an outstanding record for getting graduates good jobs. Just under four in every five end up in high-skilled employment, many of them having met their employer during the work placements integral to many courses. RGU mixes it with the elite Russell Group universities when it comes to graduate employment – even beating 14 of them – and there are just six universities where graduates feel their careers to be more on track. Job success is no accident. Courses have a strong vocational element to them with workplace-relevant skills embedded, and the courses themselves are often developed with significant input from employers, thereby ensuring teaching reflects the workplace. Maintaining RGU’s keen eye for the graduate jobs market, four new degrees are due to admit their first students in September. There is a choice of a BSc or MSci in advanced architectural technology, a BEng or MEng in robotics and mechatronics, plus a new LLB in law with management and (subject to validation) a BSc in business analytics. RGU occupies a modern riverside campus close to the centre of Aberdeen; Garthdee is home to around 10,000 undergraduates and 5,000 postgraduates, including 750 graduate apprenticeship (GA) learners. GA programmes span accounting, business management, data science (with AI) and engineering pathways in either design and manufacture or instrumentation, measurement and control. Aberdeen may be Scotland’s most northerly major university centre, but it is well connected by rail, air and sea. Prices have come down a lot since the Oil City boom years, making it an attractive destination now for a student on a budget.

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20. City St George’s, University of London – 77.2%

Overview

City St George’s has one of the strongest graduate employment records of any university. If you want a good job after graduating and City St George’s offers the subject you are interested in, it ought to be part of the conversation. The university has a new name but a long history. Two years on from merging, the former City, University of London and St George’s, University of London have embarked on a string of student-facing upgrades designed to make them feel positive about this new academic powerhouse. City, well known for a strong track record in social inclusion and educating for business and the professions, was a natural stablemate for St George’s, which focused on medicine degrees and courses covering many other aspects of health and social care. The merged university has already been recognised twice in our University of the Year awards – being named as University of the Year for Graduate Jobs in 2024 and runner-up for our overall University of the Year title. Campus upgrades in response to student suggestions include improved space for sports clubs and societies at the Rob Lowe Sports Centre and the opening of a new student support hub at Tooting, mirroring the one opened in Clerkenwell in 2024. These bring together student services in health and wellbeing, IT and careers and employability. There have been improvements to multi-faith facilities and a new students’ union bar, cafe and mini market are due to open at Clerkenwell. The breadth of the academic portfolio is shown in the new degrees being launched in September 2026. These span a BSc/MSci in artificial intelligence and a BA in commercial dance, with further offerings in economics, business economics and law and criminology (the latter available as both an LLB and a BSc).

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 21. Teesside University – 77.1%

Overview

Teesside has enjoyed a year in the limelight. Weeks after winning our 2026 Modern University of the Year award last summer, it was also named University of the Year by Times Higher Education. Teesside is among the most successful universities in the UK by any number of criteria. It is one of just 15% to hold a triple gold award in the latest Teaching Excellence Framework, covering student experience, student outcomes and an overall rating. Among the most socially inclusive of universities, it brings study opportunities to young people who would miss out elsewhere in a town and region where higher education progression is historically low. And in a university sector awash with debt, Teesside has invested £300m in its Middlesbrough town centre campus over the past decade without borrowing a penny. The most recent addition, the Digital Life building, has one of the world’s largest immersive simulation suites, digital art studios, smart industry facilities and advanced cybersecurity labs – to be used for the first time by the September 2027 intake on a new BSc degree in virtual production. Next up, Teesside wants to open a medical school, with preparations well underway. There are more than 2,500 degree apprentices – mostly in Middlesbrough and a smaller base in nearby Darlington – taking a debt-free route to a degree across over 30 programmes. Apprenticeships were rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted for the teaching quality and strength of industrial partnerships, and two new level 6 apprenticeships are about to be introduced for teachers and early years teachers. A resolute focus on employability means Teesside ranks just outside the top 20 in the UK for getting graduates into good jobs, an exceptional performance. Employability modules are embedded in curriculums and students are encouraged to explore their options through internships, work experience and volunteering.

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22. University of Bradford – 76.8%

Overview

Bradford was our University of the Year for Social Inclusion last year and shortlisted for our overall UK University of the Year title. This was a recognition of both the university’s extraordinarily diverse student intake (70% have parents who did not attend university) and its sustained success in the graduate jobs market, where more than three quarters of students gain high-skilled jobs. Bradford continues its ascent of our ranking this year (its third successive rise) breaking into the top 30 and has also made its debut in the top 500 of the latest QS World University Rankings. However, the university has been hit hard by a collapse in international student numbers; income from their tuition fees virtually halved from £78.6m to £40m between 2023 and 2025, leading to a £16m deficit in the 2024-25 accounts. New vice chancellor Prof Gillian Murray’s arrival in July was marked by a commitment to foster an entrepreneurial spirit and to create new partnerships with industry and government. She said Bradford had never been afraid to do things differently. ‘This matters, because higher education is entering a period where doing more of the same is unlikely to be enough.’ Bradford already works with 3,000 local, national and international employers to offer career development and support the institution’s ethos of offering ‘more than a degree’. Employers have had a say in the design of many courses, which often carry professional accreditation. Bradford offers an extensive range of science, technology, engineering and health-related degrees, and is a major supplier of newly qualified staff to the NHS with a strong portfolio of nursing, midwifery, paramedic and other healthcare degrees. The culturally diverse city is easy on the student pocket too; it was named the most affordable in a 2026 StudentCrowd survey for the second successive year.

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23 (joint). Aston University – 76.6%

Overview

Catering for a largely Brummie constituency – 77% of UK admissions came from the immediate West Midlands region last year – Aston has strong records for both social inclusion and graduate employment. The university ranks second in England in the latest Social Mobility Index, published by the Higher Education Policy Institute, which measures the number of socio-economically disadvantaged graduates at each university and the social distance they have travelled. Aston also ranks in the UK top 50 across all three of the graduate employment measures included in our league table, with more than three quarters of the students landing high-skilled jobs when they leave and often earning well too. To keep things that way, the university has embedded what it calls Aston Power Skills into every degree programme. These are the key skills – AI and digital literacy, innovation and entrepreneurship, environmental sustainability and inclusive leadership – that the university believes employers are looking for. A strongly vocational course portfolio has business, computing, engineering and healthcare subjects at the fore. Vice chancellor Prof Aleksandar Subic in Aston’s 2030 strategy document highlights being ‘inclusive, entrepreneurial and transformational’ as the three things that will define the university’s future. It is some way down the road towards achieving much of this already. Aston has the second highest proportion of students of ethnic minority heritage and the 42 student start-up businesses registered in 2023-24 puts Aston among the top 40 universities nationally. It was also the first one to embrace degree apprenticeships, and today there are more than 1,100 apprentice learners on campus following nine programmes – providing transformational outcomes for apprentices and employers alike. The number enrolled is expected to rise further.

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23 (joint). Glasgow Caledonian University – 76.6%

Overview

Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) is an agile and effective modern establishment that delivers both well-respected degrees and graduate employment in an increasingly fractured jobs market. A serial award winner in our University of the Year awards, GCU is also ranked third among universities founded since 1992, after two successive years topping the tree. Starting more than 150 years ago as an institution for ‘the common weal’, it continues to deliver on that commitment today by recruiting more than one in five of all the students in Scotland who make it to university from the 20% of postcodes considered to be the most deprived. Students from all backgrounds enjoy considerable success in the graduate jobs market, where GCU outperforms many Russell Group universities in terms of the proportion of students – more than three in every four – landing high-skilled jobs. That success is founded on a vocationally orientated portfolio of degrees; GCU is one of the biggest providers of health, social care and life sciences graduates for the NHS and produces more building and surveying graduates than any other university in the UK. It is also the largest provider of graduate apprenticeships in Scotland with more than 1,100 apprentices on its books in September 2025. Seven programmes include civil engineering, accountancy, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence and data science. The university is in the throes of completing an upgrade to its virtual learning environment, GCU Learn, through which students access learning resources and materials. Improved navigation; consistency in delivery across phones, laptops, tablets and desktops; and new features that will allow students to track their progress through their learning activities are among the upgrades to be available from the 2026-27 academic year.

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25. St Mary’s University, Twickenham – 76.5%

Overview

The opening of the Centenary Building this autumn marks two institution-defining events for St Mary’s, one of the smallest and most distinctive universities in this guide. The first is the 100th anniversary of the founding of its attractive Strawberry Hill campus and the second is the opening of the university’s School of Medicine, housed in the new development, which welcomes its first intake in September 2026. The latter has the potential to be among the most significant in the university’s history, admitting St Mary’s to the exclusive club of universities with medical schools. Initially offering places to only international students, the university will hope to admit UK ones in the coming years. Watch this space. St Mary’s began life 175 years ago as a Catholic teacher training college. Its religious foundation – and an associated caring ethos – continues to this day but the university now admits students of all faiths and none. Alongside teacher training – for which St Mary’s was our top-ranked institution last year – the university has been best known until now for its ten sport-related degrees, spanning everything from coaching to communications and rehabilitation to psychology. Based in a leafy part of south west London, St Mary’s offers a less frantic student experience compared to the London norm. The university has around 5,500 undergraduates, with places for 650 students in halls on campus, which is also home to outstanding sports facilities and the spectacular gothic revival Strawberry Hill House.

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26. University of Southampton – 76.4%

Overview

Southampton aims to put its graduates at the front of the queue when it comes to literacy in AI. It claims a national first in making AI training part of every undergraduate course from September this year. Students will complete a course covering AI skills, ethics and creativity, ensuring they are fluent in using tools effectively and responsibly. Then, within their disciplines, they will engage with specific applications of the technology, embedding practical use of AI across all fields of study – from medicine to engineering, from humanities to science. The university says it wants its graduates to ‘be creators, not just consumers’ of AI. Embracing the mood of change further, Southampton has also launched an interdisciplinary module in Global Sustainability Challenges, available in all degrees bar medicine and engineering, to help students understand the most pressing challenges in this area. Improvements to the university estate continue, with £400m of work in the pipeline. September 2027 entrants will be the first to use Building 75, a campus gateway teaching and learning building with multi-departmental lecture theatres, an event teaching space, a student hub and places for independent study. Construction of a new STEM building is also underway, serving multiple faculties and the disciplines for which Southampton is best known. Upon completion in 2028, it will become a hub for interdisciplinary study, research, and innovative teaching, equipping students with more of the skills desired by employers. Graduate employment is already one of Southampton’s strongest suits, with more than three in every four students in high-skilled jobs within 15 months of graduating. Admissions hit record levels in September 2025 as Southampton joined most of the Russell Group in expanding its intake. It is based on several sites across Southampton, centred on the Highfield campus and with the Winchester School of Art beyond.

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27. University of Strathclyde – 76.3%

Overview

For good reason, Strathclyde has been a serial winner of awards since this guide’s first publication in 2023, peaking with its success as UK University of the Year in our previous edition and following that up by winning University of the Year for Research this year. Constantly within our elite top ten, last year’s award recognised Strathclyde’s exceptional track record for graduate employment in key areas of national shortage, social justice in its recruitment strategies and a relentless focus on creating an outstanding student experience in one of the UK’s leading cities, with its buzzing student social scene. It is a model 21st-century university. This year’s research award recognises the work of academics at the cutting edge of their subjects who command research income per capita at a level typically found at Oxford and Cambridge. It was established as a ‘place of useful learning’ more than 225 years ago – and its course portfolio keeps that aspiration alive. A focus on engineering and technology, science and business translates into good jobs with excellent salaries for the vast majority of graduates – even in today’s difficult graduate market. Industry and business routinely have input on course structure and delivery, with many companies offering student placements. The past year has seen a £12.5m makeover of the John Anderson Building, home to the physics department, with the introduction of enhanced thermal insulation (good for those cold winters and increasingly warm summers), new ventilation and heating systems plus an overhaul of teaching spaces and audio-visual facilities. Strathclyde is organised into four faculties – engineering, humanities and social sciences, science and its business school. It has a diverse student intake, boasting the highest outright number and the highest proportion of recruits from the most deprived 20% of postcodes among all high-tariff, research-intensive Scottish universities.

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28. University of Bristol – 76.2%

Overview

Bristol continues to pile up the applications. Last year, a record 65,000 were received via UCAS and even a 9% rise in the number of students admitted did little to assuage the competition for places. With eight applications for every spot, Bristol is among the toughest universities to get into. And yet this Russell Group member was among the first to use contextual offers to open up access to students who had been socially or educationally disadvantaged. About 35% gain their places via an offer pitched two grades below the standard entry requirements. Bursary awards to support many of these students are generous, with £13m spent on bursaries, scholarships and hardship support in 2024-25. Bristol’s graduates are in demand. The latest High Fliers research for The Graduate Market in 2026 saw them rank as the sixth most in-demand among leading graduate employers, comfortably above Oxford and Cambridge. The university is a dominant presence in the city and the opening of the £500m Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus in September this year will only increase its visibility while also regenerating a whole district. The new teaching and research development will drive forward digital, business and social innovation. Students, academics, businesses, public and private-sector partners, and the local community will work collaboratively there with a key objective being to enhance student employability even further with opportunities for skills building, networking and learning from real-life challenges. While other universities are shutting their language courses, Bristol (perhaps sensing an opportunity) is launching 11 new modern languages joint honours courses in September studied in conjunction with subjects as diverse as law, music, theatre and philosophy.

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29 (joint). Queen’s University Belfast – 76.1%

Overview

Queen’s University Belfast achieved a new high in the latest QS World University Rankings, putting it among the top 175 institutions in the world, and its own students have voted it University of the Year at this year’s Whatuni Student Choice Awards. For good measure, Queen’s also carried off top spot for best students’ union, best student support and best student life. A ringing endorsement if ever there was one. One of just two universities in Northern Ireland, Queen’s is also a member of the elite Russell Group of research-led institutions. But its horizons are more global these days, exemplified by Hillary Clinton, its choice of chancellor. Queen’s has a strong reputation for teaching and research as well as an outstanding graduate jobs record which sees three in every four students land a high-skilled job within 15 months of graduating. Entrepreneurs are nurtured, too, with Queen’s ranking first or second in the UK for the past six editions of the i2i University Spinout impact ranking. All of which helps attract about 10% of its domestic intake from mainland Great Britain. Queen’s is located in an attractive district to the south of the city centre with the magnificent Lanyon Building at its heart. The university does modern as well as historic, however, and the Weavers’ Hall residential development in the city centre, opening in September, is home to 459 students in Ireland’s largest eco-friendly Passivhaus building. Medicine and healthcare subjects are by far the largest academic area, followed by social sciences, engineering and technology, and business – but Queen’s is a true academic all-rounder. It has a socially diverse intake with about 30% of last year’s coming from homes with an annual income of less than £19,204 to qualify for the means-tested Queen’s Bursary, worth £480 per year.

29 (joint). University of Leeds – 76.1%

Overview

Leeds is one of the fastest growing universities in the UK, with admissions now standing at just under 10,000 a year – up by about one third in the past three years. Applications have levelled out at just shy of 70,000 over the same period, placing it behind only Manchester, University College London, King’s College London and Edinburgh in popularity among applicants. The reasons for that are not hard to discover. A member of the elite Russell Group of universities, its graduates remain in demand even in the toughest graduate jobs market in a generation. According to High Fliers research, it is among the ten institutions most targeted by the top graduate employers. Leeds University occupies an attractive central campus in a city that knows how to enjoy itself with students at the very heart of it. Those joining in 2027 will reap the benefits of a £32m programme of improvements to that campus, which include refurbished teaching spaces, upgraded laboratories and enhanced digital learning infrastructure. New informal learning hubs and social study areas are being created in many academic buildings, with the civil engineering, electronic and electrical engineering and social sciences buildings the focus. One of the best endowed bursary and scholarship programmes gets financial support to students who need it most and the Access to Leeds contextual admissions scheme is one of the most successful and long-standing in the UK, with over 10,000 undergraduates from under-represented backgrounds admitted since its inception in 2003.

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 31. University of Exeter – 76%

Overview

Exeter was a strong contender for our University of the Year award and a five-place rise in its overall ranking at the business end of our league table tells only part of the story behind its success. For an institution that continues to be a firm favourite of the privately educated, it manages to recruit an extraordinarily socially diverse cohort of students. It has more degree apprentices on campus than any other Russell Group university, delivering earn-while-you-learn degrees without the student debt. And 36% of last year’s intake qualified for a contextual offer of two to three grades below standard entry requirements in acknowledgement of various social, economic or educational disadvantages. This level of diversity saw Exeter named University of the Year at the 2025 UK Social Mobility Awards. The breadth of Exeter’s appeal pushed up applications and admissions by 16% and 20% respectively to new highs in September 2025. The university is investing heavily in facilities – everything from new 120 and 60-seater computer teaching labs to a new £6m sports changing facility at the Duckes Meadow sports site, from the new Sarah Turvill Multifaith Centre to creating additional space for face-to-face wellbeing appointments and counselling sessions. Skills development has been built into all degrees with communication, collaboration, critical thinking and digital confidence embedded into core learning. The university has two campuses in Exeter: the main Streatham campus is considered to be one of the UK’s most beautiful and has the majority of students. A second Exeter site, St Luke’s, is home to the medical school, and there is a third campus at Penryn in Cornwall, shared with Falmouth University.

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32. London South Bank University – 75.6%

Overview

London South Bank University (LSBU) is one of our highest ranked modern universities for good reason. It challenges the idea that a diverse student intake and flexible entry requirements translate into low attainment, a ruinously high dropout rate and poor graduate outcomes. So, despite having one of the highest proportions of first-generation students and one of the most ethnically and socially diverse campuses in the UK, LSBU graduates are among the best paid and most likely to go into a high-skilled job. Four in every five students achieve a first or 2:1 in one of the university’s highly vocational degrees. No wonder LSBU was ranked sixth in the world for reducing inequalities in the 2025 Times Higher Education Impact Rankings. In addition to 13,000 undergraduates, there are 2,500 earn-while-you-learn degree apprentices enrolled here across 19 programmes, the bulk of them in engineering and built environment. The university’s embracing of this debt-free route to a degree is in step with its commitment to breaking down the barriers to university as well as its alignment with the needs of employers (2,000 of whom partner the institution). LSBU educates 7,000 employees, with employer-sponsored students making up one third of the student population. Headquartered in the much revamped Elephant and Castle district in Southwark, there is a further campus in Croydon for business and healthcare students. The recently opened Centre for Health, Injury and Performance – an immersive suite of health laboratories – is the latest addition to facilities for healthcare students, who make up the largest subject grouping. Nine immersive suites that recreate hospital ward and critical care environments feature remote-controlled high-fidelity mannequins to replicate real-life emergency and non-emergency medical scenarios. The centre has labs for developing technical skills – including venepuncture, cannulation and catheterisation – and a virtual reality anatomy room.

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33. University of Edinburgh – 75.3%

Overview

Edinburgh is the fourth most popular university in the UK among prospective students, drawing in more than 70,000 applications in September 2025 – the fourth time in the past five years that it has hit this mark. They are attracted by Edinburgh’s stellar global reputation, with the university’s standings in international rankings often as high as they are domestically. This apparent contradiction arises from the fact that international rankings do not take account of student satisfaction, which is measured by the National Student Survey (NSS). Poor NSS outcomes have been an Achilles heel for Edinburgh over the past 20 years and hinder the university in our table, keeping it just outside of our top 20 this year. Founded in 1583, it has a long history of academic excellence and is a world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and data science. It is home to the UK’s national supercomputer, Archer2, and has developed six new hubs in different areas of data-centric technologies and AI, bringing together academics and industry to drive innovation. Edinburgh is working hard to improve connection with its students and their wider university experience with upgrades to facilities and even the food served in halls and catering outlets. There is also a concerted drive on further reducing carbon emissions at a university already ranked 4th in the world for sustainability by QS World University Rankings. Teviot, the world’s oldest purpose-built students’ union building, has reopened after a 30-month refurbishment; the Engineering Forum opened in March, creating a hub for engineering students with new laboratories, study spaces and classrooms, while the Edinburgh College of Art campus in Lauriston Place is getting a major facelift. Raising Nutrition has recognised Edinburgh’s commitment to student health by cutting the frequency and portions of unhealthy foods and using vegetables, fruits, proteins and wholegrains.

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34. Edinburgh Napier University – 75.1%

Overview

Edinburgh Napier University (ENU) is one of Scotland’s leading modern universities (those founded since 1992) but with a history going back to its founding as a technical college in 1964. Those origins give a clue to its subject focus today, which centres on business, engineering, the sciences, computing and health and social care – with the creative industries thrown in for good measure. There will also be 500 graduate apprentices on campus by September following eight programmes in cybersecurity, data science, software development, IT management, business and a number of engineering and construction options. ENU supplies just short of 1,000 nurses and midwives each year to the NHS, educated in the university’s Clinical Skills and Simulation Centre, which offers some of Scotland’s best training. This strong vocational portfolio helps explain why ENU has one of the strongest records in graduate employment of all universities, ranking once again in the UK top 40 for the proportion of graduates progressing to high-skilled jobs. The university is based on three campuses in the west of the capital – Craiglockhart, Merchiston and Sighthill – and caters for mostly Scottish students (who accounted for 2,885 out of 3,010 undergraduates admitted via UCAS in September 2025). Library and IT infrastructure are getting a revamp. Collaborative audiovisual technology is being upgraded in all library group study rooms to better support hybrid and group study and the university Wi-Fi will also be enhanced to be faster.

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35 (joint). Harper Adams University – 75%

Overview

On the eve of its 125th anniversary, Harper Adams last year won the inaugural Specialist Institution of the Year award given by Times Higher Education magazine – a recognition of the sustained excellence that makes the university part of any conversation when it comes to considering land-based degrees and careers in farming. Located on a rural Shropshire campus, academic facilities sit alongside and within the university farm, which contains dairy, beef and pig units, two flocks of sheep, poultry facilities and hectares of arable land and grassland given over to research projects. Harper Adams students are regularly Young Farmers of the Year across a variety of agricultural disciplines, and graduates make their mark in the working world once they leave, ranking the university in the top ten nationally for students believing their careers to be on track 15 months after graduating. Most courses have a placement year where students gain valuable experience. A recently-opened second campus, a high-tech hub in central Telford, brought the university into an urban landscape for the first time to deliver digital skills training and immersive simulation technology. A £400,000 investment there will develop Ai:Mates, a new centre for AI in manufacturing, agri-tech and engineering skills. A further £150,000 investment at the main Edgmond campus will expand the existing Collaborative Simulation Laboratory. The first graduates emerged from the Harper and Keele Veterinary School in summer 2025 at the end of their five-year veterinary medicine and surgery degrees. The opening of the vet school in 2020 – rated number one in the UK by students in last year’s National Student Survey – added the missing piece of the jigsaw to give Harper Adams 20:20 coverage of its specialist area.

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35 (joint). University of Hertfordshire – 75%

Overview

The University of Hertfordshire admits its first medical students in September this year, the opening of its medical school being a major landmark in the history of this well-respected – and highly ranked – modern university. Sadly, for now, the medical school is only permitted to offer training to international students, but it is hoped to be allowed to expand to UK students soon and help address Britain’s own shortage of doctors. The medical school, based on the university’s original College Lane campus, recreates real-world medical environments with a six-bed simulation ward, virtual anatomy laboratory, immersive clinical skills rooms and virtual and augmented reality technology. Healthcare has long been one of the subject areas for which Hertfordshire is best known – and for which it scores best in our subject rankings. A new Health building is scheduled to open in 2028, which will provide modern teaching and clinical training for the full range of healthcare disciplines. They are already benefiting from new VR healthcare facilities, allowing students to practise skills in projected environments. Engineering students have a new wind tunnel and testing environments to support aerospace and automotive engineering research. This emphasis on practice alongside learning pays dividends in the jobs market, where Hertfordshire punches above its weight in terms of the proportion of graduates landing high-skilled jobs and the salaries they command. The de Havilland and College Lane campuses are a short distance apart from each other in Hatfield, which lies just north of London. UCAS admissions picked up in September 2025 – but applications hit a ten-year low. The university has a notably diverse student population, with high proportions from ethnic backgrounds and those who are the first in their immediate family to go to university.

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37 (joint). University of Sheffield – 74.8%

Overview

Sheffield is a hugely popular choice with applicants and remains our top-ranked university in the North. But you will have to be a high achiever to win a place, with eight students now chasing every spot as Sheffield resists the trend seen elsewhere in the Russell Group of massively expanding its domestic student intake to compensate for declining overseas numbers. It recruits strongly across England and Wales, and many students fall in love with the city and settle there after graduating. The green campus (there are 10,000 trees apparently) close to the centre makes for a pleasant learning environment. Shortlisted for our University of the Year award in 2024, Sheffield is a rare breed in the Russell Group in regularly excelling in the National Student Survey, evidence of the university matching the high expectations of its students when it comes to the quality of teaching, student support and their wider experience. With three in four graduates still landing high-skilled jobs when they leave, Sheffield graduates are clearly more in demand than many right now, the university ranking among the top 20 for popularity with leading graduate recruiters, according to the respected High Fliers 2026 Graduate Market Report. This success is not unrelated to Sheffield’s formidable strength in engineering, a highly regarded medical school and excellent provision for healthcare courses which have seen heavy recent investment in facilities. Elsewhere, several lecture theatres and seminar rooms across the faculties of science, social sciences, engineering, and arts and humanities will be upgraded ahead of the 2027-28 academic year. An area close to the students’ union at the heart of the campus has been reclaimed with biodiverse planting and new seating and similar improvements made to the outdoor environment in the Endcliffe Student Village.

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37 (joint). University of Wolverhampton – 74.8%

Overview

The opening of the Black Country Medical School (slated for September 2027) will be a significant moment for the University of Wolverhampton; a heavyweight addition to this ambitious modern university. Working in partnership with nearby Aston University, Wolverhampton had originally hoped to open the school in a few weeks. In the meantime, it has created a Walsall Health Hub for its already large population of healthcare students. Occupational therapists and physiotherapists have joined nurses and paramedics on the university’s Walsall campus, which is equipped with simulated skills laboratories to replicate real-life working environments. At City campus in Wolverhampton, the university has created a School of Creative Industries Hub, alongside high-spec computer labs and a screen school, as part of a push on digital excellence. A £60m investment in digital and AI capabilities will take place over the next five years. Wolverhampton is also seeking to cement its strong performance on high-skilled graduate employment by building credit-bearing professional placements into every undergraduate degree. Its new professional development framework has been developed in collaboration with industry leaders, alumni and academics. It will provide live industry projects, employer-designed assessments and global networking. The university’s new Springfield site, its second Wolverhampton location, is a specialist architecture and built environment campus at the heart of the city’s Green Innovation Corridor – a district with a focus on sustainable construction, computing and engineering. With the recent move of the department of engineering to a new home on the campus, students will find themselves at the heart of a fast-expanding green technology zone. All these developments should help future-proof the university for its socially diverse student body and keep it moving in an upward direction in our ranking. Few institutions recruit more broadly, with the proportions of mature, ethnic minority and first-generation students among the very highest.

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39. University of Staffordshire – 74.6%

Overview

This is a good moment to consider Staffordshire, our 2027 Modern University of the Year. An outstanding 12 months has seen it rise to top place in our rankings among the universities created since 1992, the opening of a 700-room student village and student hub and another University of the Year win – this one from the Graduate Futures Institute at its Academic Employability Awards. The judges praised its strong embedding of employability within degree programmes with a sharp focus on graduate outcomes. Graduate employability is one of Staffordshire’s strongest suits in our 12 ranking measures – three quarters of graduates land high-skilled jobs – and the university seeks to build on this by rolling out a new curriculum in time for the September 2027 intake. This will draw on Staffordshire’s success in using immersive and simulation-based learning to give students real-world experience, now to be part of every course. Degrees will also develop students’ professional practice and equip them with digital and AI skills required in the workplace. These developments come as the university prepares to open a 1,000-room student village and student hub on the Stoke-on-Trent campus. The £100m investment provides a significant lift in the quality of facilities and the hub will act as a gateway for student support and base for the community-building ResLife team, with spaces for social (and other) uses, a roof terrace and outdoor seating. The main campus is supplemented by sites in Stafford – where most nursing and healthcare courses are – Lichfield, Shrewsbury and London. The academic portfolio at the latter (on the Here East hub in Stratford) will be significantly expanded for 2027; courses are expected to span law, business, esports and education. Staffordshire also provides a significant number of degree apprenticeships, with 23 programmes and around 2,100 apprentices enrolled.

40. University of Manchester – 74.2%

Overview

The University of Manchester was just 390 short of breaking the 100,000 applications barrier for admission in September 2025. It seems inevitable that this landmark will be breached this year, as the popularity of Britain’s biggest campus university continues to soar. While near-neighbour Manchester Met and University College London admitted more undergraduates than Manchester’s 10,785 last September, neither can match it for overall undergraduate and postgraduate numbers. The university is well aware that the sheer scale of the place can seem daunting, and its Cosy Campus initiative can be seen as a response to this and the university’s consistently lacklustre scores for student experience, student support and teaching quality in the National Student Survey. Cosy Campus spaces are sprouting up in buildings such as the Alan Gilbert Learning Commons, the Ellen Wilkinson Commons and the Main Library, offering kitchenettes to warm and eat food, wellbeing rooms, bookable study spaces and group and individual seating. In the past year, Manchester has also refurbished the University Place Drum, adding spaces for studying and socialising, more sockets for laptops and phones and generally creating a more relaxed environment. Taken together, these developments are putting a human face and adding a softer touch to a huge university operation. Students are drawn to Manchester by the outstanding reputation of the university and the city for academics and partying respectively. Manchester is one of the great research powerhouses, with academic strength across all disciplines, notably in health and life sciences and science more broadly. Students have taken over swathes of Manchester; the university alone has more than 8,000 residence spaces. One of the largest student accommodation developments at Whitworth Park has had a major refurbishment over the past two years.

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 41. Sheffield Hallam University – 74.1%

Overview

Three buildings opening in 2025 significantly improved teaching, learning and research facilities for many students at Sheffield Hallam University (SHU). Located on two sites in the heart of Sheffield, SHU is also spreading its brand to London, opening a new campus in Brent Cross in 2027. The developments on City Campus have created new homes for Sheffield Business School, the Institute of Law and Justice, Institute of Social Sciences and for architecture students within the Institute of Creative Industries. The buildings have been constructed around Hallam Green, a new central green space with seating for up to 150 people. The development includes food venues, social spaces and two rooftop gardens for students as well as the university’s not-for-profit legal practice, Hallam Legal Advice Centre. The business school includes an engagement area and a trading floor equipped with industry-standard software. Business, nursing and healthcare, computing and teacher training are among the key subject offerings. SHU is one of the largest providers of earn-while-you-learn degree apprenticeships with 3,300 apprentices enrolled. Unlike most regional universities, SHU is offering more than 660 places in student accommodation at its London outpost, all set in parks and green spaces, along with restaurants, cafes, sports facilities and outdoor social areas. Subject areas include accounting and finance, business, computing, law, psychology and public health. SHU will hope the opening will help reverse a downward trend in both applications and admissions, which hit ten-year lows in September 2025. This is despite students voting it among the overall top five universities in the UK in this year’s Whatuni Student Choice Awards, even finishing top for cost-of-living support. Sheffield is one of the great student cities – cheaper than most and with a great nightlife.

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42. Cardiff University – 74%

Overview

Cardiff is emerging from a period of turmoil with a new vision for the next decade and a promise to teach students ‘in a way that develops them into resilient, critical, problem-solving change-makers who know how to work together in an uncertain, interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral, digitised world’. If the university manages this, it can only build on its outstanding record in the graduate jobs market, one of its strongest suits in our rankings. Graduates remain in demand even in the current difficult times. Applications and admissions have been booming at the only Russell Group university in Wales, making it a hot student destination. It has two campuses: Cathays Park in the city centre and the more modern Heath Park a mile away, which is home to healthcare-related courses and the University Hospital of Wales, where the medical school is located. The opening of new hubs in different disciplines is designed to give students easier access to support, whether that’s wellbeing, details about assessments or questions about programmes. Library facilities have also been upgraded with increased numbers of study spaces, new furniture and loanable noise-cancelling headphones. The hubs and library upgrades should go some way towards addressing consistently low scores for student support in the National Student Survey. After a period of retrenchment following much publicised financial difficulties, the university is launching four new degrees this September – computer science with cybersecurity, mathematics for the modern world, Welsh and a modern language and archaeology and heritage science. A new BSc in economics and management will start in September 2027. The latest NatWest Student Living Index shows Cardiff provides the most affordable big city student experience, behind only Lincoln and Bolton.

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43. Newcastle University – 73.9%

Overview

Newcastle University recruits strongly from across the UK – with applications topping 37,000 for the first time in the September 2025 cycle – despite mediocre recent performance in rankings such as ours and a record in the National Student Survey that suggests students are less than enamoured with both the teaching and the levels of student support on offer. The revamped King’s Gate building should go some way towards addressing the latter. A new central help desk, staffed by the university’s student engagement team, will act as a first contact point for students looking for support. The building also contains a start-up hub for student entrepreneurs, one-to-one appointment areas for accessing careers support, an event area for workshops, flexible spaces for both socialising and studying and even a pop-up shop where students can showcase their products, creations and businesses. Recruits are attracted by the university’s solid record as a member of the elite Russell Group of research-led universities, a good graduate jobs record (about three quarters of students land high-skilled jobs), an outstanding medical school and healthcare courses for 8,000 students, and the city’s reputation as a place that knows how to party. A new MSci in management, entrepreneurship and innovation launches this year, and a BSc in international business and finance will recruit its first students for September 2027 – both within the university’s well-respected business school.

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44. University of Liverpool – 73.8%

Overview

The University of Liverpool is growing like topsy, one of several Russell Group universities dramatically increasing their intakes. Admissions are up 45% over the past three years and applications also hit record levels last year, surging by 6,000 (13.5%) compared to 2024. Few can match Liverpool’s national appeal, with strong recruitment from across England and Wales. One of the redbrick universities founded in the late 19th-century which opened higher education to a wider audience, Liverpool continues to attract a socially inclusive student population. Nearly one third of the intake are the first in their immediate family to go to university and Liverpool has the largest proportion of admissions from the 20% of postcodes where fewest progress on to higher education of any Russell Group institution. The cachet of being one of the 24 research-led universities in that group attracts many and academic strength spans medicine and healthcare, veterinary medicine, dentistry, business, law, architecture and engineering. The university occupies a substantial precinct at the heart of the city, and the wider area is also a draw with its legendary nightlife, multiple social and sporting attractions and coastal location. The latter quite possibly plays into Liverpool’s outstanding scores for student experience in the National Student Survey, which stand somewhat at odds with the institution’s somewhat lower rankings for satisfaction with teaching quality and student support. A £23m extension to the School of Architecture has just been completed, incorporating the latest in virtual reality and digital design suites while maintaining Liverpool’s redbrick heritage through materials that align with the existing estate’s colours. Among new degrees planned for 2027 are two MPhys physics options with nuclear science or medical applications and a new BSc in AI and business analytics.

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45 (joint). Northumbria University, Newcastle – 73.6%

Overview

Northumbria is one of the highest ranking modern universities and has a research profile that was not far short of the elite Russell Group of research-led universities at the time of the last assessments. The opening of the North East Space Skills and Technology Centre later this year will further cement Northumbria’s research reputation. Developed with the UK Space Agency and Lockheed Martin, the £50m development will bring together industry and academia to collaborate on research while delivering specialist education and training for students heading into the UK’s growing space sector. Two new degrees – a BEng/MEng in aerospace and satellite engineering and a MSc in aerospace satellite engineering – begin teaching in September this year to coincide with the launch. Beginning at the same time, Northumbria will trial fixed block degrees in three subjects – international business management, business and analytics, and health and social care – meaning that all campus teaching will be scheduled across three fixed days a week for the full duration of the programme. These Degree in Three courses are designed to help those with work, family and other life commitments to plan their studies. Our 2024 Modern University of the Year, Northumbria already does well for graduate employment, and the university will hope that offering Claude for Education to all students will help them gain a further edge in the increasingly difficult jobs market. Northumbria was just the second university to offer the AI tool to staff and students earlier this year to guide learning and encourage critical thinking rather than providing direct answers. The university is a good destination for budding entrepreneurs too. It ranked 5th in the UK in 2024-25 for graduate start-ups based on their estimated turnover – the 17th successive year where Northumbria has been placed in the top ten.

45 (joint). University of Hull – 73.6%

Overview

Students like Hull, as evidenced by its strong performance most years in the National Student Survey. The university will need to push this ‘happy students’ narrative hard as both applications and admissions for September 2025 fell to ten-year lows, with Hull reaping the consequences of Russell Group universities sweeping up increasing numbers of candidates with B grades at A-level who would have previously gone to places such as this. A 15-place rise in our ranking to a new high should help focus attention on what Hull does well. The university offers both one of the cheapest – and liveliest – student cities in which to study and a strong academic reputation across multiple disciplines, with business health and social science courses among the most popular. It is investing £2.4m in a civil engineering laboratory in the Robert Blackburn building to support new engineering programmes, as well as upgrading current infrastructure. Already home to the well-respected Hull York Medical School, run jointly with the University of York, Hull opened a £48m Wound Innovation Institute research facility on its Cottingham Road campus this summer. The institute, partnered with Polaroid Therapeutics and Reckitt, aims to revolutionise the treatment for chronic wounds – which costs the NHS £8.3b annually. Hull’s London campus is on the move to a new site close to the East Bank cultural quarter in Stratford, east London, offering a suite of Master’s programmes in business management, logistics and marketing. The university has a diverse intake, with around half the students the first in their immediate family to go to university and about five in six UK-based students recruited from the immediate Yorkshire and Humberside region. 

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47 (joint). University of Buckingham – 73%

Overview

Degrees are cheaper at Buckingham. The university has a long-held advantage from pioneering work in delivering degrees in two years rather than three, saving living costs. And to mark its 50th anniversary this year, the private University of Buckingham is pushing its financial edge further by cutting the annual price of degrees in English literature with creative writing, business management and leadership, business management and marketing and business entrepreneurship from £13,875 to £7,830. With total tuition fees for two-year degrees of £15,660 and annual fees for three-year degrees in the state sector nearing £10,000, Buckingham’s will cost around half the price charged elsewhere. Students are on a riverside campus in the pretty town of Buckingham, where teaching is modelled on that in nearby Oxford with small classes and an intensity from the two-year compression. The university has been celebrating its birthday with campus upgrades, notably to student accommodation. With the Crewe medical campus closed this year, the Chandos Road medical school in Buckingham has been upgraded to include GP surgery and home visit simulation rooms with virtual reality headsets, and an outdoor social space. Hunter Street library study rooms have been refurbished and the Tanlaw Mill is now a lively venue by night and a relaxed cafe-style study zone by day. A recent You Said, We Did campaign highlights student feedback being acted upon. This is in response to poor scores in recent National Student Surveys which left a university that topped satisfaction rankings ten years ago propping up national rankings on some satisfaction measures. Much stronger graduate employment performance is behind this year’s substantial rise in our ranking. A small university of about 3,000 students, Buckingham offers a compact portfolio of courses with a strong presence in business, computing, law and teacher training plus a thriving medical school.

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47 (joint). University of East Anglia – 73%

Overview

One of the 1960s generation of universities, the University of East Anglia (UEA) retains something of the rebellious spirit of that age even today. At the heart of its spacious green campus, it is currently renovating – and reinventing – its most famous architectural feature, the Grade II-listed Lasdun Wall, which will incorporate new science laboratories, more than 30 teaching rooms, social and study spaces and an 85% improvement in thermal performance when it is complete in the 2027-28 academic year. By then, it aims to be offering a Bachelor of Dentistry in response to acute local shortages of NHS dentists. Sat alongside UEA’s medical school, it will ‘complete the set’ for the university as a serious establishment. A new high-tech anatomy suite opens this September with immersive teaching rooms, modern laboratories and formaldehyde-free facilities for clinical learning. Over 200 partnerships with overseas universities in more than 40 countries allow UEA to offer one of the most extensive Study Abroad programmes of any university, with students able to spend a semester, year or summer term enhancing their academic experience and future employability abroad. The latter is further bolstered by strong industry links, work placements, careers guidance and real-world employability embedded into all courses. The university is also expanding on-campus clinical and professional placements to benefit students and the local community. Students ranked it 9th for the quality of work placements in the 2025-26 Rate My Placement awards. For a university of its type, UEA has an unusually large number of degree apprentices on campus. More than 900 are following seven (mostly health and social care-related) programmes, with plans for expansion.

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47 (joint). University of the West of Scotland – 73%

Overview

The University of West of Scotland (UWS) topped the recent Times Higher Education Sustainability Impact Rankings for encouraging sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, productive employment and decent work for all. This aligns with its track record more broadly on graduate employment, where the university punches well above its overall ranking for the proportion of graduates who land high-skilled jobs and the salaries they command. As the focus of prospective students shifts more to the economic return from studying, this should stand UWS in good stead. The university’s success in the jobs market is even more remarkable given it can also claim to be Scotland’s leading university for widening access to higher education, with 32.2% of admissions in 2024-25 coming from the most deprived 20% of Scottish postcodes. Care leavers and students estranged from their parents benefit from UWS’s Careers Connection Scheme, which offers one-to-one careers advice and access to the university’s employer mentor programme. Providing opportunities for all who stand to benefit is central to the mission of this west coast university with campuses in Paisley, Hamilton (home to the Lanarkshire campus), Ayr, Dumfries and London. Inclusivity is at the heart of its planned rollout of a new virtual learning environment for the 2026-27 academic year. It is designed to improve the learning experience, access to resources and increase student retention rates, currently something of an Achilles heel for the university as it has one of the worst dropout rates of any university. UWS’s portfolio of largely vocational degrees has been expanded in recent times to include nine graduate apprenticeship programmes spanning everything from business management to town planning (a work-based programme unique to UWS). Healthcare recruits make up about a third of undergraduates, with those studying computing, social sciences, psychology and teacher training also having a significant presence.

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50. Middlesex University – 72.8%

Overview

Admissions continue to fall at Middlesex, with 12% fewer entrants in September 2025 than the year before and admissions via UCAS down 60% in the past decade. Based on a single campus in Hendon, in north London, the university’s 11,000 or so undergraduates follow a vocational portfolio of courses. Developments in the past year have further sharpened the institution’s focus on graduate employability, giving students more access to real-world experience during their courses. New facilities include MDX Studios, a creative school, creative agency and production hub with direct links to the likes of Troubadour (the independent London-based theatre and studios operation). Students get to work on real projects to professional standards, with all courses taught in a working film and media environment using industry-standard equipment and facilities with immersive learning and AI embedded. Students from across faculties will get to work on MDX Studios projects. The new MDX Internship Scheme provides paid discipline-specific internships to students, allowing them to build professional skills, acquire industry experience and contribute to campus life. Students are encouraged to use the exchange programme to study at the university’s campuses in Dubai and Mauritius or at one of more than 100 partner institutions, further boosting CVs. Middlesex’s diverse student population feels well supported, evidenced by regular strong showings in the National Student Survey. More than half are the first in their immediate family to go to university and two thirds are from ethnic minorities. A large degree apprenticeship programme has 1,450 apprentices enrolled. New degrees planned for 2027 include game art, content creation, and user interface and user experience, plus three new music degrees studied in combination with sound production, film and games, or teaching. A new degree in music business and management is also in the offing.

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 51 (joint). Heriot-Watt University – 72.6%

Overview

Heriot-Watt University (HWU) performs well in our rankings, notwithstanding this year’s dip in form, its position buoyed by a good record for getting its graduates into well-paid, high-skilled jobs. This is not unrelated to the university’s focus on science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects, for which there remains a stout demand for graduates – even as opportunities evaporate in other areas. Students are encouraged to look outwards, with many courses offering work placements or years in industry. HWU’s Go Global programme allows students to take part of their course – for a semester, a year or longer – at one of its overseas campuses in Dubai or Malaysia. Courses and modules are common and taught in English across all campuses, making it all the easier to switch locations and enjoy overseas study experience. Most students are based on HWU’s attractive 380-acre parkland campus in Riccarton, south west of the capital. Here, its Global Research Institute in Health and Care Technologies has recently added a collaborative immersive suite that can simulate hospital and care settings from around the world. The suite is furnished with real hospital equipment and Alex, a medical simulation robot that can be programmed to exhibit various medical symptoms and responses. The smaller Scottish Borders campus in Galashiels is home to the university’s fashion, textile and design courses, while Stromness in Orkney is home to the International Centre for Island Technology and three postgraduate MScs in marine science and renewable energy. A £2.5m refurbishment of the Galashiels campus will be complete by September 2026. HWU makes extensive use of minimum entry requirements to open its courses to students from backgrounds traditionally under-represented on campus, and the university has several foundation programmes for those without the qualifications necessary to progress directly on to a degree.

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51 (joint). University of Plymouth – 72.6%

Overview

‘A regional university with a global outlook that takes its civic responsibilities seriously’, is how the University of Plymouth, our Community University of the Year, describes itself to us. Far from being hyperbole, there is ample evidence of it delivering on this mission statement. Regional meets global when it comes to the university working with and supporting Plymouth’s defence-based industries. Located near to the largest naval dockyard in western Europe, the university is the anchor institution for the newly created National Centre for Marine Autonomy, which will draw on the university’s expertise in configuring autonomous systems for environmental monitoring as well as defence and commercial operations. As the UK looks to ramp up defence spending, the university collaborates with several defence industry partners, including the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Navy and Babcock International. The university’s regional presence meets civic responsibility in Plymouth’s Centre for Eyecare Excellence (CEE), a £7.7m project due to open in September this year. The CEE’s new home will offer more appointments, often delivered by supervised students, alongside specialist clinics. It will seek to build on the impact made by the Peninsula Dental Social Enterprise, which welcomed its first patients – locals without a regular NHS dentist – in February. Both enterprises are part of Plymouth’s substantial healthcare footprint, demonstrating how a university can be transformative not just for its students but for the wider community around it. Plymouth is one of 13 modern universities to have a medical school, alongside a dental school and a range of other healthcare degrees spanning nursing, midwifery and paramedicine. The university is seeking to embed real-world, hands-on experience of the workplace across all courses, with the university already punching well above its weight for both the proportion of graduates in high-skilled jobs and the salaries they earn.

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53. University of East London – 72.3%

Overview

The University of East London (UEL) is our University of the Year for Student Support and by far the biggest riser in our league table – up 51 places no less – thanks to stellar National Student Survey (NSS) results and a sharp improvement in graduate employment. About half of its students are first-generation and UEL achieves even greater levels of ethnic diversity on campus. It does its utmost to ensure they have successful university careers. Financial support is well targeted and student wellbeing support is recognised by the awarding of the Student Mental Health Charter Award by Student Minds – UEL being one of the first five universities to receive it. Students appreciate the opportunities afforded to them across the three campuses – two in Stratford and the mothership on the Royal Docks – with UEL earning consistently high NSS ratings for teaching excellence, student support and their wider experience. It is preparing for a big moment: the chance to offer medical degrees from September 2028. The new medical school, subject to final approval from the General Medical Council, will be within UEL’s £170m redevelopment of its Health Campus. This includes a new building, due to open in time for September 2027 students, which will house clinical skills centres, mock wards and a university primary care facility, providing scores of placement opportunities. All of this very much aligns with UEL’s mission to provide career-ready graduates, which translates into extensive student placements, live employer projects and industry-standard facilities. Fostering an entrepreneurial spirit, the university is ranked second in the UK for the number of graduate start-up businesses it generates. There are also 900 degree apprentices, working with more than 270 employer partners and attaining an 81.3% Qualification Achievement Rate, far in excess of the national average of 54%. 

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54. University of Northampton – 72.2%

Overview

Northampton is one of just two universities (Teesside being the other) that offers a new laptop to all first-year students when they enrol. This speaks volumes about the extent of student diversity here and the university’s desire to give them all an equal start whatever their background. It helps the university score significantly better than its overall ranking for student support and student experience in the National Student Survey, but it is not helping with attracting applications at present. Both the numbers applying and being admitted hit ten-year lows in September 2025. Northampton has a lot to offer, not least its Waterside Campus on the banks of the River Nene – opened in 2018 and the first wholly new university campus to be built in the past 30 years. Further upgrades include a new simulation suite which will benefit the many students enrolled on healthcare courses and those studying physiotherapy, dietetics, speech and language therapy, and operating department practice in particular. New BSc degrees in the latter three specialisms are planned for the September 2027 intake. Northampton is also working on creating new degree apprenticeships in these three areas, plus options for social workers and teachers to add to the 14 existing degree apprenticeship programmes. There are 300 earn-while-you-learn degree apprentices enrolled alongside 12,000 undergraduates. In addition to the university’s strong showing in healthcare courses, it has a significant presence in business and the social sciences. About half the students are the first in their immediate family to go to university and more than one third come from ethnic minority backgrounds. One in four are mature returners to education and for those with young children, the opening of new on-campus childcare facilities will add significantly to their student experience.

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55 (joint). De Montfort University – 71.7%

Overview

Leicester-based De Montfort University (DMU) has switched to a block teaching model in which students learn one module at a time over a seven-week period. DMU was the first university to adopt this approach across nearly its entire curriculum, a move which is now spreading steadily through the sector. Its aim is to better allow students to balance their studies and other commitments – be that work or family – and it reflects the changing face of the student population. With the first cohort of entirely block-taught students now graduated, the university says the switch is yielding wider benefits, including increased student confidence, improved sense of belonging, ability to better manage workloads and reduced stress. Student satisfaction scores measured in the National Student Survey have been pushing up. DMU is the latest university to open a London outpost, offering a number of postgraduate business and data analytics courses delivered two days a week. Students here benefit from DMU’s Edge programme, a six-week professional development module focussed on employability, digital skills, sustainability and enterprise. The university is growing the number of international students, helping to offset a decline in domestic applications that hit a ten-year low for September 2025. UCAS admissions were also down 7% on the year before, tumbling to below 5,000 for the first time in that period. The university is aiming to grow the 580 degree apprentices enrolled, with three new programmes in finance, housing and secondary education teaching in the offing. A suite of new law degrees will also be offered from September 2027, alone or with criminology, criminal justice and business law both at LLB and Masters level.

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55 (joint). Keele University – 71.7%

Overview

Keele is the very model of consistency in an increasingly volatile university world. For the past decade it has attracted much the same number of applications and largely recruited the same number of students each year. They are drawn by a strong multi-faculty academic pedigree and a course portfolio that allows for unusual subject combinations. There is also a beautiful 600-acre parkland campus to enjoy when not studying, sited close to Stoke-on-Trent and with good road and train connections to the entire country. Keele was one of just 15 universities to achieve an overall gold rating in both assessments for the Teaching Excellence Framework in 2017 and 2023 – and it hasn’t sat on its laurels since. A new Human Performance Laboratory opened last year for students studying sport, exercise and rehabilitation-related subjects and to support the developing work of Keele’s Institute of Sport. The launch of multiple engineering programmes this September will be backed up by a new cutting-edge laboratory, which will include fabrication workshops, 3D printing capabilities, a design suite and collaborative working spaces. The dozen BEng and MEng degrees being launched span (general) engineering and specialist options in chemical, mechanical, electrical and electronic, civil and mechatronic engineering. The first students from the Harper and Keele Veterinary School graduated last summer, putting the university among an exclusive group of just 11 institutions in the UK to train vets. All courses can be taken as a four-year option with study abroad or a work placement. Keele recruits about 70% of its UK students from the West Midlands and North West England, scoring highly for social diversity as one of the top 20 universities in the latest English Social Mobility Index, which measures the number of and social distance travelled by socio-economically disadvantaged graduates at each institution.

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57 (joint). Canterbury Christ Church University – 71.6%

Overview

Heavy investment in improving the student experience is bearing fruit across Canterbury Christ Church University’s (CCCU’s) courses and campuses. New Student Zones have opened in Canterbury, Medway and Tunbridge Wells, uniting facilities and resources to help students succeed. This encompasses course and study skills information, wellbeing support, budgeting advice and IT support. Placement teams are also located in the new zones to help students with paperwork and requirements to do with placements, as well as advice on health and safety, insurance and risk assessments for those about to go on placement and a contact point for those already on them. Placements are an important component of many CCCU degrees – particularly popular/required on business, computing and healthcare courses – all of which now have new Your Journey to Success modules (see Student support and campus culture, below). Extra help with maths and statistics is now available for all students through the learning skills team. It is one of a small number of modern universities with its own medical school, run with the University of Kent, and has come a long way from its foundation as a teacher training college in 1962. Today, CCCU offers a diverse portfolio of courses including business and management, nursing and healthcare, law, media, sport science and music and performing arts. It does notably well in our graduate employment measures – a reflection of the vocational nature of many courses, which feed large numbers of graduates into the public and private sector. There are also more than 500 degree apprentices on campus, mainly on healthcare programmes, with new options in midwifery, primary school teaching and possibly engineering to come.

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57 (joint). Royal Agricultural University – 71.6%

Overview

The mission of the Royal Agricultural University (RAU) is to address the global challenges presented by climate change, food security and community wellbeing. No mean task for the first agricultural college in the English-speaking world, which celebrated its 180th anniversary in 2025. RAU is also embracing present times in the students it recruits, moving away from its stereotypical huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ image, with a new emphasis on diversifying what was formerly a socially and educationally narrow intake. A new BSc in farm management will be introduced from September 2027, joining an academic offering that is built around a small number of core degrees (agriculture; agricultural business management; bloodstock and equine performance management; business management; environment and sustainability; equine science and business; real estate; and rural land and property management) plus several complementary foundation degrees, foundation years, top-up courses and professional placement years. After the opening of a new Land Laboratory Teaching Centre in 2025 to train students in climate-smart, resilient agriculture and land management, attention has turned to upgrading sporting and social facilities on the RAU’s attractive rural campus, a 15-minute walk from Cirencester. On-campus padel facilities will be operational by September 2027 to support both physical wellbeing and community engagement.

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57 (joint). Ulster University – 71.6%

Overview

These are good times for Ulster University. Applications grew by 10% for courses beginning in September 2025 – part of a boom following the opening of the university’s Cathedral Quarter campus in Belfast in 2022. This has given the university an academic and cultural hub at the regenerated heart of the Northern Irish capital. But Ulster is not getting complacent. More changes are being made to the Belfast campus with the improved study spaces, digital learning environments and specialist facilities across a range of disciplines such as art and design, architecture, business, computing and built environment. Integrated cultural and creative facilities encourage practice-based learning and engagement with industry and the wider community. These include the £75m Studio Ulster virtual-production facility for training students with the latest technology in film, broadcasting, commercial media, animation, gaming, immersive cinema and visual effects. Serving a predominantly Northern Irish student population, the university has a proper regional footprint with campuses in Derry-Londonderry and Coleraine and the sports village in Jordanstown – with rolling upgrades across all three. The aspiration for the Derry-Londonderry campus is a student population of 10,000, as shown in the acquisition of the Timber Quay building and its redevelopment to include modern laboratories and teaching facilities for computing and engineering. There are further plans for a new teaching and student centre. Investment in Coleraine is building its capabilities as a centre for health, life sciences and sport-related education, with upgraded teaching laboratories, research facilities, and student learning environments plus improvements to sports and wellbeing facilities. The campus optometry clinic has been refurbished, providing eye care for the surrounding community while giving students valuable clinical and business experience. A new degree apprenticeship for human resources managers in September brings the number of degree apprenticeship programmes to 22, and more than 1,100 enrolments.

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57 (joint). University of Glasgow – 71.6%

Overview

Glasgow is celebrating its 575th anniversary this year and looking firmly to the future as an extension to its main campus progresses. Work is well under way on the fifth major construction – the Keystone Building – on a 14-acre site adjoining the main Gilmorehill campus. It is expected to be ready for students in 2028-29, when the total spend on the new developments is expected to have reached £1.3b. It will accommodate 3,600 students in its general teaching and learning areas, dry and wet laboratories, and high-spec computing labs. It will also provide a maker’s workshop and teaching facilities for the James Watt School of Engineering. Work is underway to upgrade the annexe of the main university library too. Four buildings have been rolled out already – The James McCune Smith learning hub, the Advanced Research Centre, the Clarice Pears Building for the School of Health and Wellbeing and the Adam Smith Business School. They have added considerably to student facilities, enhancing their learning experience – something that has begun to filter through in this year’s scores in the National Student Survey, which show a significant improvement in previously poor results for teaching quality and student experience. This uplift has helped move Glasgow into our elite top 20. It is the more Scottish of Scotland’s two Russell Group universities, with 80% of UK recruits drawn from north of the border. Those from England, Wales and Northern Ireland qualify automatically for a £3,000 annual bursary that more than offsets the cost of an additional year of tuition needed to complete Scottish degrees. The university has a second Glasgow site at Garscube, home to the veterinary medicine school and outdoor sports facilities, while a campus in Dumfries offers degrees in primary education, environmental science and sustainability, and global sustainable development.

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61. University of Salford – 71.2%

Overview

Salford is part of what is effectively the largest extended student campus in western Europe. Around 110,000 are currently studying at Salford, Manchester Metropolitan and Manchester universities, all on adjacent sites close to the centre of this vibrant student city. Salford is the smallest of the three and hugely popular with local students, three-quarters of whom come from the North West. The university is in the throes of a major upgrade – the most ambitious in its history – under a campus connectivity plan which will deliver new teaching, research and public spaces. The overarching aim is to unite education, industry and innovation, while achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2038 thanks to the construction of new buildings that will be fully electric and low-carbon. A cornerstone of the project is the new Thrive Health and Wellbeing Centre, due to be completed before the end of the year. As well as providing top-notch teaching, practice and research facilities in clinical quality spaces for the university’s substantial suite of healthcare courses, it will also offer public services for the local community. Among the courses to benefit will be occupational therapy, sport science, podiatry, prosthetics and orthotics. Already complete on the Peel Park campus is the £14.3m Greater Manchester Institute of Technology (GMIoT) building. Working with further education and business partners in the region (including the BBC, Laing O’Rourke, GCHQ and Siemens) GMIoT will offer technical education and training across the construction, engineering, computing, creative media, business and health sciences sectors. The university works closely with business and industry more generally, and has built a considerable reputation in media and television courses, benefiting from its proximity to MediaCity (one of the largest concentrations of studios outside of London).

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62 (joint). Lancaster University – 71.1%

Overview

Lancaster University is on a roll, with both applications and admissions for September 2025 hitting record highs. Founded in the 1960s, the university and its campus infrastructure have moved with the times, and both are now among the greenest in the country. Lancaster’s wind turbine meets about 15% of its energy demands (which tells you something about the weather in these parts) and for the first time in Spring 2026, the university regularly generated all its own electricity after completing its in-house solar farm. Gas heating will be all but eliminated when a new energy centre using heat pump technology opens in 2027. The refurbishment of the East Estate of the Lancaster University Management School – completed earlier this year – was also undertaken with sustainability in mind. The £20m project was not only cheaper than a new build, but produced a carbon saving of more than 80% compared to a new-build equivalent. In a further nod towards sustainable energy, the university has just completed a unique Nuclear Control Room Simulator. Lancaster is also a gold-rated hedgehog-friendly campus. Based in 578 acres of parkland on the edge of the pretty city of Lancaster, the university has nine colleges that form the social epicentres of student life. Teaching takes place on a university-wide basis, but students form a strong affinity with their college. Subject strengths range from medicine, engineering and the sciences through to social work, English, drama and creative writing. The Lancaster University Management School is also highly rated.

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62 (joint). University of York – 71.1%

Overview

York is one of the Russell Group universities that has suddenly become much easier to get into. Admissions jumped by 25% in September 2025, virtually all the near-1,400 increase in undergraduates being UK students. All this while applications fell, cutting the competition for places from 5.9:1 to 4.6:1. This is great news for anyone considering York, one of the 1960s generation of universities now considered among the academic elite. It is one of four Russell Group universities with a top ten ranking for research quality and a gold rating in the official Teaching Excellence Framework assessments. It is particularly well known for social science, history, languages and biosciences. York won our Community University of the Year award in 2025 for its central role in the cultural, economic and academic life of the City of York and wider northern region, embodied in its hugely successful annual Festival of Ideas, a free two-week cultural event for all ages. The original Campus West has been supplemented by Campus East and its new facilities and colleges (which are social rather than academic groupings). Both sites are impressively low-rise and pleasing to the eye, lying about two miles from the city centre. Investment in them continues, with upgrades to the JB Morrell Library among the projects due to be finished by September 2027. The York Sports Village will have new artificial pitches by then, further improvements will have been made to accommodation, and the School of Archaeology will have moved to the Berrick Saul building as part of an effort to move teaching and research to more modern and sustainable buildings. York recruits widely from across the UK and was the first Russell Group university to sign the Social Mobility Pledge, backed up by an extensive range of outreach programmes in less-advantaged communities.

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64 (joint). Plymouth Marjon University – 70.9%

Overview

Plymouth Marjon offers a personal higher education that is much harder to deliver in larger institutions. The university has just over 4,000 undergraduates, their numbers buoyed by a record-breaking intake of just under 1,000 students in September 2025. Higher education on this scale allows students to be known by name and to benefit from wraparound support. This is reflected by Marjon’s serial strong showing in the National Student Survey, although scores this year have tanked with 60+ place falls in the rankings for each of teaching quality, student experience and student support. It rises in our ranking chiefly because of a surge in recruitment of first generation students, demonstrating Plymouth Marjon’s commitment to social inclusivity. The university began life in the 19th century as two teacher training colleges in London that eventually merged and in 1973 moved to Plymouth. It has diversified since then, although teacher training remains an important part of the course portfolio, contributing to the healthy 70% of graduates landing high-skilled jobs. There has been recent growth in the number of healthcare students and the opening of Marjon’s health and wellbeing hub in September 2025 with clinical skills, diagnostic and simulation laboratories will only add to the university’s appeal. The operation of these facilities as community health clinics helps embed the university in the city and wider region, from which it draws more than half of its students. Sport is another area of strength – in and out of the classroom. There are 13 undergraduate full degree programmes to choose from, and the university is one of the top-ranked small universities in inter-university competition, punching considerably above its weight. The university’s fitness suite is being refurbished, and a new floor is being laid in Marjon’s sports hall ready for this September’s intake.

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64 (joint). University of Huddersfield – 70.9%

Overview

Huddersfield can claim to be the top-rated provider of degree apprenticeships in the country – and wins our inaugural award for University of the Year for Degree Apprenticeships. In 2024-25, no university offering degree apprenticeships at scale saw more than Huddersfield’s 88% of students achieve their apprenticeships. Ofsted rated Huddersfield’s degree apprenticeship provision, which spans 11 programmes, as ‘outstanding’ and the university was the only one in Yorkshire and the Humber to achieve a triple gold award in the last Teaching Excellence Framework, covering student experience, student outcomes and an overall rating. The university – already the largest provider of health and social care apprenticeships in Yorkshire – expects to have close to 1,000 apprentices on campus by September 2027, with five new programmes to be added to its healthcare-dominated portfolio. The new options are for diagnostic radiographers, early years teachers, accounting finance managers, senior housing and property managers and leadership and management professionals. With a good graduate employment record, the university is aiming to make students even more employable in the future. The opening of the Emily Siddon building this year on the university’s National Health Innovation Campus (NHIC) added new clinical teaching facilities, an NHS community diagnostic centre and a health business innovation centre. It also boasts the latest in simulation technology – including an MRI simulation scanner that is the first of its kind in the country. Student recruitment in September 2025 saw a modest upturn and the university will hope the NHIC allows them to build on those numbers in the coming years. Huddersfield recruits strongly from both Yorkshire and the North West to a student body that is among the most socially and ethnically diverse.

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66. Wrexham University – 70.7%

Overview

Wrexham is our Welsh University of the Year off the back of 12 months to remember. It was granted research degree awarding powers in the spring – a milestone for the institution and one that reflects rising academic standards. It positions the university to drive regional growth and achieve greater impact in the coming years. Its 2030 strategy has already brought about the launch of the Wrexham Business School and the securing of additional funding to support engineering and advanced manufacturing. And work is about to begin on the university’s biggest capital development: a £22m investment in the Wrexham Business Gateway project, which will include a relocated students’ union, new catering facilities, business incubation and start-up facilities for graduates and local businesses, plus new teaching and learning spaces. Several campus upgrades are already complete, most notably the CanfodAU engineering, enterprise and optics centre, and the Simulation and Immersive Learning Centre for Wrexham’s sizeable contingent of healthcare students, which completed the university’s Health Education and Innovation Quarter. Applications grew a further 8% in September 2025, building on the previous year’s surge. Reinvigorated partnerships with regional further education providers will create new pathways to progress to degree-level study for local students, who make up the bulk of Wrexham’s intake. With high proportions coming from homes where parents did not attend university and being over the age of 21 when their courses begin, Wrexham has a strong record on social inclusion. An operating surplus and the absence of any third party debt puts it in a small minority of universities currently riding out the worst of the financial storm engulfing higher education – good news for students and the planned expansions in the pipeline.

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67. Edge Hill University – 70.2%

Overview

After 30 years of management stability and exponential improvement of the campus and student experience, Edge Hill has endured a turbulent time since the long-serving former vice chancellor John Cater retired in February 2025. His successor replaced other senior managers familiar with the unique Edge Hill DNA and then lasted barely six months in the role himself, leaving last year’s Daily Mail University of the Year for Student Experience with something of a vacuum at the top. Nevertheless, applications for admission were slightly up in September 2025, the university’s attractiveness fuelled by the completion of the Life Sciences Building – the latest in a long line of campus infrastructure developments to give students access to the most modern facilities. Built around an ornamental lake, the green, landscaped campus has been transformed in recent years into one of the most attractive in the country. Situated on the outskirts of Ormskirk and on the northern fringes of Merseyside, Edge Hill recruits heavily from the immediate North West region (83% of UK admissions in 2025) to its expanding portfolio of courses. New BScs in games development, cybersecurity and global infectious disease (the latter delivered in partnership with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine) begin in September 2026. Originally a teacher training college, Edge Hill is today a significant provider of nursing and allied healthcare graduates to the NHS and is one of 12 modern universities to have its own medical school, a significant achievement. Social and sporting facilities are excellent and students have a new students’ union building in which to play and access advice and wellbeing support. On-campus accommodation is among the cheapest in the UK.

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68. Oxford Brookes University – 70%

Overview

Oxford Brookes University (OBU) has one of the more unusual student demographics among modern universities – those created since 1992 – with half being the first in their immediate family to go to university yet one in seven recruited from private schools. The former is explained by the OBU’s commendable efforts to diversify its intake through both a generous contextual offer programme and extensive university-funded bursary support; the latter by OBU’s proximity to Oxford’s other university. OBU will even offer a philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) degree from September 2027, mirroring one of the signature dishes of the ‘other place’. OBU has recently consolidated all its teaching in Oxford on the Headington Hill campus, having wound down two other sites over the past two years, although a nursing outpost remains in Swindon. To cope with the influx of students, the university opened a new teaching building and a specialist workshop building at Headington Hill in 2025, both of particular benefit to students in the school of engineering, computing and mathematics. The Clive Booth Student Village is also being redeveloped, with the new Cherry residence due to be finished in time for the start of the 2026-27 academic year, the fourth significant addition since 2024. The opening of 22 new degrees from September all with foundation year options that have significantly lower entry requirements reflects OBU’s determination to be ‘a fully inclusive institution that reflects society at large’. And the 430 degree apprentices – following programmes for chartered surveyors, nursing associates and registered nurses – is evidence of further diversification. Despite a dip this year, the university’s graduate employment record is one of its strongest suits, with 70% of students landing high-skilled jobs.

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69. Lincoln Bishop University – 69.8%

Overview

What’s in a name? Quite a lot, it would seem. Barely four months after Lincoln Bishop University emerged from the former Bishop Grosseteste University, applications for admission in September 2026 jumped by 23% on the previous year, far outstripping the national growth in applications of a more modest 3%. In truth, several other factors – beyond a name change that finally locates the university in this pretty, historic cathedral city – will have played into this success. Last year, Lincoln Bishop was our University of the Year for Student Support, a recognition that came as it swept the board in our analysis of the 2025 National Student Survey in which it finished top in students’ ratings of teaching excellence, student support and student experience. Results in 2026 dipped only slightly, with the university ranking 4th, 2nd and 7th= respectively across these three measures. Lincoln Bishop also finished top for halls and student accommodation in the Whatuni Student Choice Awards 2025, attributable in part to the opening of the new Riseholme Road student village and competitive pricing. The university’s supportive culture stems in part from its size – fewer than 2,000 undergraduates spread across just 43 degree programmes. The relocation of its integrated student support service, The Hub, to the library provides a central and accessible contact point for all student needs from wellbeing to careers. Lincoln Bishop is renowned for teacher training, alongside other established disciplines in English, history, archaeology and psychology. More recently, it has added business, health and sports subjects to its portfolio and there is a growing number of degree apprenticeships, including for primary and secondary teachers, both with Qualified Teacher Status.

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70. University of the West of England – 69.4%

Overview

The University of the West of England (UWE) is woven into the fabric of Bristol, occupying multiple sites across one of the most student-friendly cities in the country. With more than 35,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students, it remains one of the largest universities in the country, although applications and admissions have been drifting down. It performs well in our employment rankings as about 70% of graduates land high-skilled jobs and a similar proportion feel their careers are on track 15 months after leaving. A largely vocational course portfolio in which nursing and healthcare, business, engineering, technology and computing are prominent contribute to this success. There are more than 20 degree apprenticeship pathways and over 2,200 apprentices enrolled, one of the biggest cohorts anywhere. Ofsted’s ‘good’ rating for apprenticeship provision said apprentices ‘gain the knowledge they need to be successful in their career because lecturers and employers plan curriculums that reflect the industries in which apprentices work’. UWE’s HQ is on its Frenchay campus, to the north of Bristol, where there has been significant recent investment in residential accommodation (Kingfisher Court is opening in September this year) and refurbishment of academic facilities. Parts of the main library and teaching spaces in the college of arts, technology and environment are the latest premises to get an upgrade. Several sites make up the City campus, home to UWE’s creative and cultural industries courses (its second largest subject area). It features the Arnolfini and Spike Island arts venues and the Watershed film culture and digital media centre. A third campus, Glenside, is home to allied health, social care, and nursing and midwifery students. More than half the intake in September 2025 came from the immediate South West region, with strong contingents also from South East England and Wales.

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71. University of Leicester – 69.3%

Overview

Now at its highest position in our ranking, the 2025 Daily Mail University of the Year is enjoying record-breaking booms in both applications (up 11%) and admissions (up 21%). Leicester’s win was recognition for the excellence of what it offers students by way of education and university experience and an acknowledgement of its commitment to social inclusion on campus. And the university intends to keep ahead of the curve through a partnership with Microsoft and its Copilot AI tool. Leicester is only the second university in the world (after Manchester) to offer Copilot to all students and staff. The aim is to put the university at the forefront of AI in education, while giving students the employability skills, digital skills and personal productivity that will help them hit the ground running when they enter an increasingly AI-dominated workplace. The partnership sits well with the university’s guarantee from this September to provide a minimum of 100 hours of employer-informed work-related learning embedded into every degree. This will encompass live briefs, projects, simulations, placements and community-based work to give students practical experience and professional skills alongside their academic qualification. But it’s not all work and no play at Leicester. Those joining the university in September 2027 will be the first to benefit from a hefty investment in student-facing facilities, led by a major redevelopment of the Percy Gee Building, home to the students’ union (SU). This will include a refurbishment for the SU nightclub, more space for student societies, additional social spaces and improved prayer and faith facilities. Leicester is one of the best bargains to be had in the annual dash to secure a university place. In exchange for mostly medium-tariff offers, it offers a high-quality student experience to a socially and ethnically mixed intake in a bustling multicultural city.

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72. University of Stirling – 69.2%

Overview

Stirling is a double award winner in our guide this year, lifting the Scottish University of the Year and UK Sports University of the Year titles. It is getting used to being on the winners’ podium after a stellar Commonwealth Games, where 24 of its swimmers and athletes won medals (it was Team Scotland’s official partner), and an 18-medal haul in this year’s Aquatics GB Championships at the London Aquatics Centre. Stirling is Scotland’s University for Sporting Excellence and has built a stellar sports reputation for elite and recreational athletes alike. It is the UK’s leading institution for swimming but also shines nationally in tennis, triathlon, football and wheelchair basketball. Outstanding sports facilities are set in arguably the most beautiful campus in the UK. Academic, residential and social buildings – among them the Pathfoot Building, a Category A-listed architectural masterpiece dating from Stirling’s founding in 1967 – are arranged around Airthrey Loch, with the Ochil Hills as a backdrop and a castle in the grounds. In 2024, the International Student Barometer judged it to be the third-best campus environment globally. A third successive rise in our rankings lifts Stirling into the UK top 50 for the first time this year. Academic strength spans many disciplines and most of its 170 single or combined degrees have a broad approach across the first two years of study before specialising in the final two. New degrees in liberal arts and digital media and communications begin in September. A new Student Information System will be completed for the September 2027 intake to unite student and course information on one platform with new tools to assist students as they navigate their university career. Applications have been steady at around 16,000 for a number of years, with 92% of Stirling’s UK intake drawn from within Scotland.

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73. Bournemouth University – 69%

Overview

Bournemouth student and graduate creatives are regulars on the red carpet. From the Oscars in Hollywood to various student media awards in London, the university has made a name for itself in recent times. This year’s Oscars were no exception, with graduates contributing to both KPop Demon Hunters, winner of best animated feature, and Avatar: Fire And Ash, winner of best visual effects. Multimedia journalism students working on The Breaker won the Best Newsday Website award for the third time in four years at last year’s Broadcast Journalism Training Council awards, while Nerve Radio, the student radio station, won five awards at the 2025 Student Radio Association Awards. If it’s a career in film, television or the media that you want, Bournemouth is one of the places most likely to help you get a foothold in the business. The university largely delivers on its promise to give students ‘real-world experience, entrepreneurial opportunities and pathways into careers’. And Bournemouth’s graduate employment record – with 69% of graduates in high-skilled jobs – runs considerably ahead of its disappointing overall ranking in our table. This year’s dip is driven almost entirely by poor scores in the National Student Survey. With about 20,000 students from foundation year to postgraduate, including a growing number of degree apprentices, Bournemouth’s range of courses extends way beyond film, television and media. There are two main campuses: Talbot, which is home to the faculty of media and communication, the faculty of science and technology and the business school; and Lansdowne, which houses the faculty of health and social sciences. Applications and admissions have fallen for three consecutive years despite the added allure of a stunning seaside location – with Bournemouth’s famed seven miles of sandy beach being the perfect spot for post-exam relaxation.

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74. University of Reading – 68.9%

Overview

Reading makes a serious pitch for students who take environmental considerations into account in their choice of university. It excels in this area on several fronts. Firstly, it has a global research reputation in meteorology and climate change and its environmental impact. It is shifting heavily to renewable energy on campus through a large-scale installation of solar panels and heat pumps, and – most novel of all – it has introduced 400 Global Sustainability Leaders Scholarships, with the first tranche awarded to students joining in September this year. These are worth £6,000 per year of study to those who achieve AAA at A-level (or equivalent) or AAB in a contextual offer. A competitive application process open to UK and international students requires they demonstrate a commitment to global sustainability and addressing climate and nature issues. Reading wants to develop future leaders in this area and successful candidates will get to work on knowledge and skills relevant to addressing climate and nature issues, take positive action for sustainability, build networks, engage in cross-disciplinary learning and receive careers support to work in global sustainability after graduating. The university is celebrating its centenary this year and had record numbers of applications and enrolments in the 2025 cycle. Its attractive 320-acre Whiteknights campus close to the city centre has had much upgrading, with the main teaching building and accommodation for maths, agriculture, art and communication design the focus in the past year. The estate also encompasses 2,000 acres of farmland and the smaller London Road and Greenlands campuses, the latter home to the renowned Henley Business School. There are close to 1,900 degree apprentices enrolled, with plans to introduce a digital technology solutions professional programme for 2026-27. New BScs planned for September 2027 include computer science with AI and cosmetic and pharmaceutical science.

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75 (joint). Birmingham City University – 68.8%

Overview

Engineers will be the first to experience a new style of teaching being rolled out at Birmingham City University (BCU) from September. The university is promising a transformation, with a shift ‘from theory-heavy teaching to industry-relevant skills-driven training’. Out go exams and in comes 100% project-based learning and a structure that delivers one module at a time in focused blocks. Block teaching offers the twin benefits of entrenching learning by taking modules consecutively rather than concurrently and an uptick in student wellbeing. BCU plans to roll this out in more subjects next year. It is also significantly expanding its scholarship programme, with hundreds of students across multiple disciplines to benefit from £1,000 one-year scholarships from next month. The university plays a key role in its home city and public services: 40% of BCU graduates start their careers in Birmingham; 28% of newly qualified teachers in the city are from BCU; and 43% of all new nurses across the West Midlands are trained here. BCU has a city-wide footprint that spans several sites. The City Centre campus is home to cutting-edge arts buildings, such as the £57m premises for the world-renowned Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, and uber-modern science infrastructure such as the £70m STEAMhouse with its computing and digital technology learning spaces. Edgbaston’s City South Campus houses the health professions, nursing and midwifery, life sciences and social work courses. The School of Jewellery sits at the heart of the city’s world-renowned Jewellery Quarter and the Alexander Stadium, hosting this year’s European Athletics Championships, is now BCU’s specialist space for sport and exercise science courses. New degrees welcoming their first intake in September 2026 include creative writing, entertainment design and AI. The university is also a key provider of degree apprenticeships, with 13 pathways and more than 1,400 learners taking this earn-while-you-learn option.

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75 (joint). University of Chichester – 68.8%

Overview

Size (it’s small) and location (it’s beside the sea) are the twin appeals on which Chichester has long traded, offering a different university experience to the norm. In recent times, it has added teaching excellence to its armoury as well. Chichester was rated gold for its teaching in the latest Teaching Excellence Framework assessments and Ofsted gave ‘outstanding’ ratings in all areas to both its primary and secondary teacher training. Its students back up the official judgements with consistently high scores for teaching quality in the National Student Survey and Chichester won our University of the Year for Teaching Excellence last year. It was an easy call to make. Originally founded in 1839 as a teacher training college, this remains one of its key strengths with many of the country’s PE teachers trained here. But the university’s degree portfolio now encompasses the arts, performing arts, music and musical theatre, healthcare and sport-related degrees. Reflecting this diversity, it is recruiting for a BSc in speech and language therapy, to be launched in September 2026, and a BA in liberal arts will admit its first students in September 2027. Chichester also has a sizeable contingent of 430 degree apprentices enrolled across nine diverse disciplines, including data scientist, social worker, manufacturing engineer and digital marketer. A tenth programme for registered nurse apprentices is due to be launched in the coming academic year. The university’s 5,000 undergraduates are split between two campuses – Bishop Otter in Chichester and a separate site in nearby Bognor Regis, home to the university’s Tech Park. The seaside resort claims to be the sunniest place in the country, and the university makes good use of its beach in publicity.

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77. University of Lancashire – 68.7%

Overview

Students admitted to humanities, law and policing, arts and media, and computing, maths and physics courses beginning in September 2027 will be the first to begin their degrees under Lancashire’s new block learning timetable – a change ‘to provide learning to suit the 21st-century student’. This essentially acknowledges that many of them have significant commitments beyond their degrees (about one third are mature returners to education), so they will now be able to take modules one at a time rather than the traditional teaching pattern of two or more in parallel. It is hoped this will help them learn more effectively. This will be rolled out over two years and follows the university’s rebranding in 2025, dropping ‘Central’ from its title and becoming simply the University of Lancashire. The new title better reflects its regional footprint: headquartered in Preston – one of the cheapest places to live in the UK – it has further centres in Burnley and beyond the county boundary near Whitehaven, in Cumbria, home to Westlakes Campus and its range of medical and nursing courses. Healthcare courses are the focus of current investment on the Preston and Burnley campuses with new clinical skills spaces being developed, while a five-year upgrade to IT infrastructure will introduce the latest wireless technology across the institution. Lancashire is known for its vocational courses, developed with considerable employer input. This is further evident in its extensive degree apprenticeship programme, which runs to more than 40 programmes with 2,800 students expected to be enrolled on them by September 2027.

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78. University of Gloucestershire – 68.5%

Overview

The University of Gloucestershire (UOG) promises its students that if they have not got a job within six months of graduating, they will provide six months of free support followed by the offer of a paid internship. Various terms and conditions apply but the UOG Career Promise shows a university that recognises what many students aim to get from one. UOG claims to be 8th in the UK for employability with a 95% graduate employment/further study rate. Our data is not quite as stellar, but nevertheless 68.5% of students in high-skilled jobs ranks the university 78th in the UK – somewhat higher than its overall ranking. With close ties to many local and national employers, the university boasts of having 4,000 placements, internships and trips available each year and it has just under 1,000 degree apprentices on campus taking a debt-free route to a degree with a job at the end of it. It is developing new programmes for teachers, and artificial intelligence (AI) and project managers, with a strong presence already in healthcare and computing. The university is based in Cheltenham and its near-neighbour Gloucester. Creative and performing arts subjects are UOG’s biggest study area, but there is a strong showing for healthcare, teacher training and sports too. A new FutureSim integrated simulation hub opens on the Oxstalls campus in Gloucester this year. It will bring together clinical, forensic and emergency-response training environments into one place using immersive and AI-enabled technologies. A City campus in the centre of Gloucester opened in August 2025, housed in the old Debenhams department store and now home to psychology, education and social work-related courses. Student recruitment stabilised last year, albeit at a level about one third down on a decade ago with well over half the new intake drawn from the immediate region.

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79. Coventry University – 68.2%

Overview

Coventry offers arguably the most flexible entry and study regime of any UK university. The traditional academic year goes out of the window. So, from September, there will be six student intakes per year in September, November, January, March, May and July for all undergraduate courses at Coventry University. Students will study one module at a time in six-week teaching blocks with assessments at the end of each block. The aim is to improve student progression, completion and satisfaction, better enabling students to mix studying with family and work commitments. This model has already been trialled at Coventry University Group (CU) campuses in Dagenham, Greenwich, Coventry and Scarborough. The university’s brand is widely sown both within the UK and overseas, with a new Indian branch campus planned in Gift City, Gujarat, to join the existing one in New Delhi; a second campus planned in Kazakhstan in Almaty; a campus in Wroclaw, Poland; and a new campus in Singapore offering around 20 Coventry-accredited courses. Several British universities are moving to a model of one-module-at-a-time teaching, but none are combining the shift with six admission points across the year. This new academic format and calendar have emerged from a financial crisis that engulfed the institution with successive £60m deficits posted for 2023-24 and 2024-25. After implementing widespread cuts and an institution-wide restructure, the university expects to break even in the 2025-26 academic year and will hope applications and admissions pick up after both hit a ten-year low for courses starting in September 2025. New degree apprenticeship programmes are in the offing for accounting finance managers and artificial intelligence and automation practitioners among others, which will add to the 3,000 apprenticeship learners currently enrolled.

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80. University of South Wales – 67.9%

Overview

The opening of Calon at the University of South Wales (USW) this autumn adds a stunning facility for students. Based on the Pontypridd Campus – one of three alongside Newport and Cardiff – the new hub will be home to the university’s computing, built environment, engineering and technology students. Welsh for heart, Calon will contain electronics and hydraulics laboratories, a flight simulator, a robotics laboratory, both clean and industrial research spaces, plus VR capabilities. The emphasis will be on bringing together, for example, built environment and civil engineering, aerospace and mechanics, informatics and electronics, and computing and data science. Once it is up and running, it should provide a healthy flow of graduates into in-demand areas of the economy, boosting USW’s high-skilled graduate employment rate. It is hoped to also reverse the decline in applications and admissions, which are both sitting about 40% below what they were ten years ago. The university has a significant number of degree apprentices split between programmes in engineering, construction, digital and policing, with numbers expected to rise further. The high profile of degree apprenticeships reflects the USW’s hands-on and practical approach to higher education. Its 15,000 undergraduates and 6,000 postgraduates are split across five sites in Pontypridd, Cardiff and Newport. Cardiff is home to the university’s creative industries courses, while Newport provides education and teacher training, business, computing, social work and psychology degrees. Everything else is taught in Pontypridd, where the university is headquartered and which is home to three of USW’s sites. The university is making a serious pitch for students in the current Clearing period, with a package worth up to £3,000 made up of a laptop (in the form of an Apple MacBook for some), £200 of catering vouchers and £1,500 accommodation discount for the first 150 eligible applicants.

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81. Swansea University – 67.6%

Overview

Construction of the new National Institute for Sport and Health is under way and due for completion in 2027. It builds on Swansea University’s sporting prowess by bringing together public, private and academic partners to improve population health, elevate elite and community sport and drive technological innovation and economic growth. The four-storey development is being built at the entrance to the Sports Park on the Bay Campus, home to the Faculty of Science and Engineering and School of Management on the attractive Swansea Bay waterfront. The sports hall has had its own upgrades, with a new sprung floor installed plus improved lighting and ventilation, and the university’s original home at Singleton Park has had improvements made to its lecture theatres. Applications jumped 10% for courses beginning in September 2025 and the university commits to making offers to all UK applicants provided they are studying the qualifications required for their chosen course, taking into account predicted grades, personal statement and prior achievement before setting the offer terms. Swansea challenges Cardiff each year for bragging rights as top dog in Wales (losing out by nine places this year), performing well across virtually all of our 12 ranking measures. This increases its appeal to a UK-wide student audience, with around half the intake each year drawn from over the Severn Bridge. The university is organised into three faculties – humanities and social sciences; medicine, health and life science; and science and engineering – and has a broad portfolio of courses that includes a graduate-entry medicine degree. Medical and healthcare and engineering and technology form the biggest student contingents on campus, followed by those studying business and social sciences.

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82. Manchester Metropolitan University – 67.1%

Overview

No university admitted more than Manchester Metropolitan’s 12,445 undergraduates in September 2025. This is higher education on a seriously large scale, which makes some of the university’s triumphs all the more remarkable. Among them is its regular success in the National Student Survey, which measures what students think of teaching quality, student support and their wider experience. It tends to favour smaller institutions where personal attention is easier to come by, but Manchester Met makes these three areas its top-scoring indicators in our ranking. No mean feat. The university also has 3,300 degree apprentices enrolled across 17 programmes spanning business, human resources and management, creative and digital technology, health and social care, and science. Partnered with more than 750 UK employers, Manchester Met has one of the largest populations of earn-while-you-learn students in the country and reflects the university’s commitment to providing business-relevant higher education. Ofsted has twice rated degree apprenticeship provision as ‘outstanding’ (in 2018 and again in 2022). Situated in the heart of the city, Manchester Met is consistently one of the highest-ranked modern universities and a £400m campus investment programme over the past decade has provided students with modern facilities and industry-standard equipment. The latest project has been reshaping the library, creating more flexible spaces for collaborative study and improving the building’s sustainability. The recently opened Dalton Building represents a £115m investment in STEM education and research. The university offers a broad and largely vocational course portfolio, with business and management hoovering up more than one in five students. It also has a strong presence in nursing and healthcare, creative and performing arts, and computing. The portfolio of degree programmes is constantly updated, with 31 new degrees being launched in September.

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83. University of Portsmouth – 67%

Overview

Portsmouth has a feature that makes it unique in the crowded university marketplace. Connected Degrees, introduced two years ago, allow students to go on a placement in their fourth year at university after finishing their academic studies. In other universities, placement years are taken after two years of studying. The Portsmouth approach allows students to get experience of the workplace immediately prior to seeking a job and means they get to complete their studying alongside the students they began their course with – a win socially, academically and professionally. The university will have completed a review of all undergraduate curricula by September 2027 – creating the Connected Curriculum – to maximise graduate employability prospects, with tweaks made where necessary to module content and structure as well as learning and assessment styles. Portsmouth is also looking to improve the student experience on its coastal campus. A former military drill hall is being converted into a modern home for student services, complete with consultation rooms, offices and open areas for wellbeing activities, advice and one-to-one support. A new student hub should also be completed in 2027. Strategically located between the library and the students’ union, it will contain social learning spaces, a lounge, a coffee bar and an events space. The busy port city and the beaches of Southsea, where many students live, offer a great backdrop to student life. As with so many universities, Portsmouth now has a London campus in Walthamstow. This offers a dozen degree programmes majoring in business, marketing, accounting and finance, and computer science. The university is one of the larger providers of degree apprenticeships, with more than 20 level 6 and level 7 programmes and over 1,000 degree apprentices. New programmes for paramedics, nurses, radiographers, teachers and probation officers are in the offing.

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84. University of Chester – 66.9%

Overview

Chester is popular with its students, securing repeated success in the Whatuni Student Choice Awards. This year it ranked 9th nationally for best lecturers and teaching quality, 2nd for best halls and student accommodation and 3rd for best student support. Set largely in the attractive walled city of Chester, the university offers a modern experience in a traditional setting. There are additional sites in Birkenhead and Warrington and a land-based centre at Reaseheath, near Nantwich. The university began as the country’s first teacher training college in 1839 and that remains a key offering nearly 200 years later. The recent introduction of a graduate-entry medical degree completes Chester’s suite of healthcare courses, many of which are housed in the newly refurbished Bache Hall medical sciences building. A strong presence in these areas of public sector employment – together with employer input into the development of its courses – helps the university perform respectably in each of our three graduate employment metrics. To further boost graduate work readiness, the university is creating a new FinTech Lab at its Queen’s Park site, which will mimic a City trading floor to create an immersive experience for finance and accounting students. Animal sciences students will gain from the refurbishment of the Thomas Building laboratories. There will be new animal-handling facilities, an upgraded reptile room and a state-of-the-art marine facility alongside specialist aquariums and reptile vivariums. Four new BSc degrees are recruiting their first intakes for a September 2027: applied criminal and forensic investigation, health and exercise sciences, food science and nutrition and sport and exercise nutrition.

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85. Queen Mary University of London – 66.6%

Overview

Queen Mary University of London makes a Russell Group higher education accessible to the widest possible audience. No other high-tariff institution can match Queen Mary for the diversity of its student body, more than 40% of whom come from homes where the parents did not go to university. About 30% admitted via the main admissions cycle last year had a lowered contextual offer to take into account social, economic or educational disadvantage. Largely based on a canal-side campus in east London’s fashionable Mile End, the university reflects the ethnic diversity of its surroundings. More than half of the intake in September 2025 were Asian and just 18% were white. Applications hit a new high last year, and the number of students admitted has been beaten only once (during Covid). Courses for which the university is best known span business, social sciences, engineering, law, medicine and healthcare more generally. Queen Mary has also embraced degree apprenticeships – another area where it is out of step with most of the Russell Group – with 1,000 apprentice learners on campus. Ofsted recently rated the university’s apprenticeship provision as ‘outstanding’, praising ‘demanding and ambitious teaching’ and the extent to which degree apprentices were fully included in the university community. A new home for the Queen Mary School of Business is opening on the Mile End campus in 2027, providing flexible learning spaces, modern work areas and green terraces for students, staff and the wider community – all of whom will also benefit from the free Legal Advice Centre. Opening next year as well is the refurbished Queens’ Building, featuring a multi-use social, learning and events space beneath a central atrium. It will also bring together all student-facing support services on the Mile End campus.

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86 (joint). Birmingham Newman University – 66.5%

Overview

Admissions have doubled since 2021 and applications hit a record high in 2025 as Newman expanded its course portfolio while still trying to preserve its distinctiveness as one of the smallest institutions in the country able to offer a more personal higher education. Consistently outstanding scores in the National Student Survey (NSS) reflect well on a university built around small class sizes, approachable lecturers and a sense of community. This year, Newman finished top in all three of our NSS-derived rankings covering teaching excellence, student support and student experience. Formerly a Roman Catholic teacher training college, Newman has recently built its academic profile by adding both new courses and new facilities, notably simulation suites for healthcare students. A new School of Business and Law opened in 2025, uniting teaching in the key subject fields of business, accounting and finance, law, computer science, criminology, policing and working with children, young people and families. The university has also tweaked its name to incorporate Birmingham, the city from which most of its students are still drawn. Occupying a campus on the city fringes where it merges into the Worcestershire countryside, Newman is home to fewer than 4,000 undergraduates (even after the recent expansion). It is proud of having one of the most diverse student populations of any university – more than 70% are the first in their immediate family to go to university and about half are from ethnic minorities – and has been shortlisted for University of the Year in the 2026 UK Social Mobility Awards.

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86 (joint). University of Winchester – 66.5%

Overview

Winchester offers a very different university experience to the anonymous big city institutions. But being in a pretty cathedral city a short distance from the south coast and New Forest does not mean students find themselves in an economic backwater. Indeed, the University of Winchester steals a march on most of its bigger rivals by being located in Britain’s best city for jobs and work opportunities, according to a 2025 survey for SME business magazine. It found Winchester had the highest density of businesses in the UK; an 87% employment rate; and 90 jobs advertised per 10,000 residents. The university, with its excellent reputation for teacher training and healthcare degrees, has a strong jobs pipeline for many graduates too. It boasts that 90.1% go straight into work, further study or a combination of both, the 12th highest proportion in the UK, although the university fares less well under our more exacting measure of the proportion of graduates gaining high-skilled jobs – 66.5%, ranking the university 86th= on this measure. With nearly 200 years of teacher training behind it, Winchester remains on top of its game with both primary and secondary teacher training programmes recently gaining ‘outstanding’ ratings from Ofsted, which praised ‘inspirational’ teaching and ‘exceptional’ training. Law students have a new Moot Court on the King Alfred campus and the main Martial Rose university library has just had a £5.8m makeover with more collaborative working spaces and each of its floors tailored to the differing needs of students across their three years of academic study. There are two campuses – the King Alfred campus, close to the city centre, and the West Downs Quarter, opened five years ago, which is home to the faculty of business and digital technologies.

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88 (joint). Nottingham Trent University – 66.4%

Overview

Nottingham Trent University (NTU) is a member of the rather exclusive club of institutions that admit more than 10,000 undergraduates every year. This is higher education on a grand scale, but the university’s delivery of a largely vocational course portfolio across several campuses in and beyond Nottingham breaks up the student population into more manageable proportions. They are well provided for, with more than £10m available in bursaries, scholarships and hardship funds and about one in three getting support. Consistently strong scores in the National Student Survey also make NTU one of the few large universities to secure good ratings for student support and experience. City campus is home to six academic schools, while there is another Nottingham-based outpost at Clifton, which houses engineering, healthcare and sport students. Brackenhurst is a 500-acre countryside site for animal, rural and environmental sciences and NTU’s veterinary nursing centre, about 12 miles outside of the city, and there are more sites in London and Mansfield. Following several years of heavy investment in new facilities, the university is now devoting resources to upgrading existing services to improve student experience and opportunities. A project to increase sports participation – which helped make NTU our Sports University of the Year in our last edition – and improve the teaching of sports science has just finished. The Clifton Sports Hub has been extended to provide more multi-use space for badminton, futsal, basketball and netball among other hall-based sports, while new sports science laboratories have been completed. Ask NTU hubs have been opened across all campuses to provide one-stop bases to deal with student queries efficiently across a wide spectrum of issues, bringing support and services together in one place.

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88 (joint). University of Aberdeen – 66.4%

Overview

Being located in Europe’s energy capital gives the University of Aberdeen a head start when it comes to shaping a greener future. The city and university alike have pivoted from purely gas and oil to wind, solar, hydroelectric and other sustainable energy, while developing expertise in the decommissioning process for old-school energy sources. One-year MAs in sustainable energy geoscience, renewable energy engineering and sustainability transitions are just some of the postgraduate offerings available to attract the environmentally conscious engineers of the future. Because of, rather than despite, Aberdeen’s lengthy history – it was founded in 1495 – the university is positioning itself for the future, able to combine the old with the new. Degrees introduced for September 2026 reflect this by embracing traditional fields of learning – see the MA in comparative literature – and the new – an MEng in electrical and electronic engineering with robotics. There are more than 400 undergraduate degree options, with business, medicine, teacher training and education and mechanical engineering faring particularly well in our subject rankings. Now on a secure financial footing, applications to one of Britain’s most northerly universities are stable and admissions steadily growing. The attractive mixture of the old and new is evident in Aberdeen’s stunning architecture and campuses. The modern Foresterhill Campus houses life sciences, medicine and education, while The Old Aberdeen Campus – home to the original King’s College and Marischal College – is where arts, social sciences and physical sciences are based as well as the modern and award-winning architectural gem, the Sir Duncan Rice Library.

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90. Anglia Ruskin University – 66.2%

Overview

Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) has a true regional footprint, delivering higher education in an area not particularly awash with alternatives. It has grown from its bases in Chelmsford and Cambridge (where there is one notable alternative provider) to encompass Peterborough and – since 2024 – Writtle, adding new provision in agriculture, horticulture, animal science and the environment. There is also a satellite campus: ARU London. The university recruits two thirds of its domestic intake from East Anglia. With more than 2,800 degree apprentices among the near-30,000 undergraduates, it is one of the largest providers of earn-while-you-learn degree apprenticeships in the country. There are more than 40 apprenticeship programmes spanning everything from occupational therapist to data scientist, civil engineer to digital marketer, and ARU works with more than 1,000 regional and national employers to deliver them. There has been significant spending recently on upgrading teaching and learning spaces on the Cambridge and Chelmsford campuses, alongside a £2m investment in immersive learning technologies plus new engineering and robotics laboratories, a supply chain laboratory and enhanced workshop facilities. Two teaching buildings have opened at Peterborough, while Chelmsford’s library got a £1.2m refurbishment. ARU is one of a few modern universities to have a medical school and, since the merger with Writtle University College, has the capacity for students to move seamlessly between further and higher education on the same (or sister) campus. The university is one of the biggest providers of health and social care graduates in the country, but is expanding in other areas. It recently won £2.5m from the Office for Students to enhance computer games design provision on the Cambridge campus, meaning it can double enrolment in the subject by 2028. Jobs skills are built into degrees, contributing to ARU outperforming its overall ranking for graduate job prospects and salaries.

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91. Kingston University London – 66.1%

Overview

All clear for take-off! Another record undergraduate intake in September 2025 confirmed Kingston as among the more popular student destinations of the moment. Substantial investment in campuses, equipment and technology – which includes a new Airbus A320 flight simulator – as well as upgrades to student accommodation has refreshed much of the university’s offering across several sites in and around Kingston upon Thames, an attractive Thames riverside district in south west London. New facilities include a simulated hospital ward at Kingston Hill with a fully interactive four-screen immersion suite. The faculty of engineering, computing and the environment now has a lab with humanoid robots and an electronics and electrical engineering lab with high-performance electronics test equipment at the Roehampton Vale campus. But the university is most proud of the completed rollout of its Future Skills education programme in September 2025. The university claims this makes it the only UK university to have embedded the development of the key skills that employers value the most as a core, taught and assessed component within every degree. Among the key qualities that Future Skills seeks to develop in students are creative problem-solving, adaptability, digital competency, empathy, enterprise and resilience. Kingston is expanding its network of UK and international business partners to provide students with live briefs to work on; placements and site visits; a new careers centre; and an Employer Connect space on campus that hosts sessions led by employers and other partners. All these initiatives are aimed at improving the currently so-so job prospects for Kingston’s socially and ethnically diverse student cohort in an increasingly competitive graduate jobs market. Among several new degrees for September 2027 are a BSc in bioinformatics and two BScs in business management with finance or supply chain.

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92. Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh – 66%

Overview

There is a strong vocational focus across the tight portfolio of 37 undergraduate programmes offered by Queen Margaret University (QMU). Most of QMU’s developments in the past 12 months have been geared to refining that focus further. The Edinburgh Innovation Hub opened opposite QMU’s coastal campus in late 2025 is a £40m joint venture between the university and East Lothian Council to foster innovation and enterprise by creating a place for small and medium enterprises to develop. Bringing research, industry and academics under one roof, student placements and graduate employment are expected to flow via the Hub as it grows. QMU degrees have gained two important accreditations recently: the Association for Business Psychology has formally accredited QMU’s new BA in business psychology, while the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) has given level 5 dual accreditation to the university’s business management degrees. This means students will graduate with a CMI Level 5 qualification in Management and Leadership in addition to their degree, enhancing their competitiveness in the jobs market. Finally, a partnership between QMU, Edinburgh Napier University and Edinburgh College gives students access to the Red Triangle Hub, an entrepreneurial support service across all three institutions. These initiatives will have played into QMU’s success at this year’s Whatuni Student Choice Awards (WUSCAs), where for the third successive year students voted it the top in Scotland for career prospects (although there is room for improvement in QMU’s jobs performance in our exacting high-skilled jobs measure). Two thirds of undergraduates are engaged in healthcare, teacher training and business courses. QMU also scooped first place in Scotland for student halls at the WUSCAs. The university’s student village has space for 800 students and is located on QMU’s attractive parkland campus, close to the sea in Musselburgh and a short distance from Edinburgh.

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93. University of Brighton – 65.9%

Overview

Three campuses – City, Moulsecoomb and Falmer – spread across Brighton are now the focus of all university teaching. A heavy investment programme has prepared Brighton for this, and the dividend is hoped to be reversing the surprising decline in applications that fell to a ten-year low in 2025. The redevelopment of Brighton’s Falmer campus has created one of the region’s biggest hubs for sport and health learning. At its heart is the new Brighton Sport and Health Complex and the School of Education, Sport and Health Sciences, which will feed around 1,000 Brighton students into careers in the NHS and the wider health sector, making it one of the country’s larger providers. Brighton has the complete suite of healthcare provision as the first modern university to open a medical school way back in 2003. The Brighton and Sussex Medical School is run jointly with city neighbour, the University of Sussex. Falmer is also home to the Square One Cricket Academy, which for 2026-27 is offering 60 free, fully funded places to University of Brighton students who want to train, compete and develop their game in one of the UK’s top cricket environments. The university has recently been awarded £2.5m from the Office for Students to transform teaching and learning spaces and enhance the student experience on the Falmer and Moulsecoomb campuses. The money will fund an upgrade of audio-visual technology and building infrastructure with a focus on facilities for engineering, computing, digital and AI, creative industries, and business and management students. Popular with students, Brighton is one of the most fashionable seaside locations in the country, famed for its nightlife and tolerance. It is less than an hour from London by train for those in search of even brighter lights.

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94 (joint). Liverpool John Moores University – 65.6%

Overview

Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) helps fuel the public sector with a steady supply of graduates. It is one of the UK’s largest providers of registered nurses for adult, child and mental health care, and it trains up to 600 teachers and 500 police officers or criminal justice professionals each year. It makes a significant contribution to the private sector too, with LJMU graduates behind more than 250 start-ups in the Liverpool City Region. About 60% of the intake are from the North West – more than 9,000 students on campus from the Liverpool City Region alone – making this one of the top choices for local school leavers wanting to study close to home. In today’s volatile student market, application levels here are remarkably consistent. The university attracts one of the more socially diverse student intakes, with about 45% of recruits coming from postcodes that are among the 40% considered to be the most deprived. There are two campuses: Mount Pleasant, home to the faculties of business and law, and arts, professional and social studies; and City, where health, science, and engineering and technology students are based. Alongside a large undergraduate intake, there are more than 1,500 degree apprentices. LJMU backed a Charter for Change over the summer to support the teaching of English in universities and schools, calling it ‘one of the foundations of British “soft power” across the world’. With study of the subject in decline – but not at LJMU where English and creative writing remain a key part of the university’s subject portfolio – the campaign group claimed that English in its underpinning of our creative industries is worth £120bn annually to the Exchequer.

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94 (joint). University of Greenwich – 65.6%

Overview

The University of Greenwich is the driving force behind one of the most interesting developments in British higher education in decades. From August 1 it became part of the London and South East (LASE) University Group. Unsurprisingly, it will be keeping its original name above the front door. So will the financially troubled University of Kent, the other university involved in the new group with which Greenwich shares its Medway campus. But in merging some functions of both institutions, savings will be made which should protect – and even increase – spending on the important student-facing stuff: courses, facilities, support and the like. Greenwich has been one of the higher education success stories of the past two decades, with a socially and racially diverse student population reflecting its location. It has increased its student intake by 80% since 2016 and dodged the downturn in applications that has hit so many other universities. Undoubtedly, a campus that is centred around the Sir Christopher Wren-designed Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich plays a part in the attraction, not least to international students who make up more than one third of undergraduates. But so do its courses, which are strongly vocational and lead to well-defined career paths (notwithstanding this year’s significant dip in the proportion of graduates landing high-skilled jobs). In keeping with this, two new degrees are being introduced for September 2027, a BSc in children’s nursing and a BEng in robotics. Business, computing and healthcare are three of the biggest areas and it aced the 2023 Teaching Excellence Framework, securing a gold rating. Beyond Greenwich, the university has two other sites in Avery Hill, also in south east London, where most health and social care students are, and Chatham, home of the Medway campus and schools of pharmacy, science and engineering.

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96. Leeds Beckett University – 65.4%

Overview

Leeds Beckett will be hoping to further boost good recent scores in the National Student Survey for student support and experience, with significant investment in academic, sporting and social facilities across its Leeds campuses. The university has two sites – one in the city centre and the other more outlying in Headingley, where students of two of its key subjects are based: teacher training and sport. The latter site is getting a 3G pitch, a modernised library and a new catering outlet in the James Graham Building. The university is also investing in social learning spaces across both campuses, enhancing the student experience beyond the classroom and providing a base for those that commute especially. A new gallery is to be opened on the City Campus – a significant addition for the Leeds School of Arts – providing exhibition space for teaching, assessment and public events. The university keeps its portfolio of largely vocational degree courses and degree apprenticeships under constant review. Among new degrees for September 2027 entry are several business options which include a BSc in leading business in a digital era and a MSci in economics and global markets. Leeds Beckett has one of the larger populations of degree apprentices, with around 900 students following 13 programmes spanning healthcare, engineering and management. There is a focus on embedding skills valued by employers within degree programmes, and recent upgrades of computing, sport, education and healthcare facilities will produce graduates familiar with workplace-standard technology and skills. Applications and admissions to this large, socially diverse modern university are remarkably consistent, with strong recruitment from the Yorkshire and Humber region accounting for 55% of undergraduate admissions.

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97. University of West London – 65.1%

Overview

The University of West London (UWL) boasts one of the most diverse student populations of any university. A previous winner of our University of the Year for Social Inclusion, UWL recruits more than half its students from postcodes with the highest levels of deprivation, more than one third recruited in September 2025 were over 21 when they started their course and more than two thirds were drawn from ethnic minorities. Flexible admissions criteria that place a premium on relevant experience alongside academic qualifications turbocharge that diversity. In March, UWL agreed a Student Compact, setting out commitments between the university and its students largely around a promise to prepare them for not just their first jobs but a lifetime of careers. A Student and Graduate Futures department has therefore been formed, uniting careers, placements, volunteering and employer engagement into a single service. Careers development now begins in week one of the first year, with all students given a Passport to Progress to record their professional development. Careers support is guaranteed for as long as needed post-graduation and the university has set a target to get 76% of graduates into high-skilled employment by 2029, a substantial rise from 65.1% presently. Introduced in the 2025-26 academic year, students have access to Studiosity, a 24/7 support service that provides feedback on writing, study skills and assignment preparation. This is particularly valuable to the sizeable number of students who work while studying and cannot access support during normal campus hours. UWL aims to open a school of pharmacy, recruiting its first intake in September 2028. Before that, the first students will join new degrees in games design and development and game art and animation this year. With just under 1,200 students across 25 programmes, UWL is one of the capital’s largest providers of degree apprenticeships.

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98. University of Essex – 64.8%

Overview

The closure of the university’s campus in Southend-on-Sea over the summer is a significant reverse for the University of Essex as it works to get its finances on a more sustainable footing. Many universities have been hit by the financial crisis that has gripped higher education for the past three years, but few have been forced into such drastic action. The 800 Southend-based students – mostly studying in the business and health and social care schools – will transfer to Colchester, uniting the schools on one site. There, a cultural and creative quarter will be created to house displaced students from the closed East 15 Acting School, although East 15 will retain a second outpost in Loughton, north east London. The influx from Southend will boost student numbers at Colchester after several years of falling applications and admissions, the latter down by 44% on 2019 levels in September 2025. The adverse publicity that has accompanied the reorganisation is a shame for a university that offers something distinctive in an often vanilla higher education landscape. Founded in 1964, Essex quickly made a name for itself – its students’ politics as radical as the Brutalist tower blocks that dominate the campus and surrounding Essex countryside to this day. The university is renowned for its politics and social science degrees. Life sciences also, which is getting a £2.5m investment for a Biosciences Skills Training and Research Laboratory (or BioStar-Lab). Sport is also continuing to enjoy heavy investment. A £300,000 upgrade of the Essex Sport gym will take place over the summer, and as part of its collaboration with Essex County Cricket Club, £70,000 is being spent on new hybrid – and more durable – wickets on campus which will allow more games to be played each summer. Howzat?!

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99. Brunel University of London – 64.6%

Overview

After seeing its student population decline from just under 18,000 to not even 13,000 in just two years, Brunel will be hoping for a dividend from its decision to join forces with the University of London. A 15% increase in admissions in September 2025 hints at better times to come. The two institutions came together in October 2024 when Brunel joined the federation of 17 research-led institutions. The student population was already split 50:50 between domestic and overseas students and the extra pulling power of the University of London brand should extend Brunel’s international appeal. With 145 nationalities represented on its Uxbridge campus, there is a strong cosmopolitan feel to the place. About three quarters of the domestic intake come from London and more than 80% of students come from ethnic minorities. The university is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year and while some of the architecture betrays its 1960s origins, significant recent investment in buildings such as a new medical school and a Learning and Teaching Centre, opened in 2022, keep things looking fresh and modern. A pioneer of sandwich courses – which offer a year working in business or industry – as part of a four-year degree, Brunel focuses on technical, professional and applied disciplines, with life sciences, business and computer science among the most popular courses. It also has a formidable reputation for sport; its list of British Olympians includes Alan Pascoe, Kathy Smallwood-Cook, Iwan Thomas, James Fox, James Cracknell and Kate Richardson-Walsh. Sports scholarships worth up to £3,000 per year continue to attract the best as well as the university’s outstanding training facilities. These have been further improved in the past year with the opening of a gym extension and a reconfiguration of existing provision to improve both capacity and student experience.

100. Bangor University – 64.5%

Overview

Fresh from opening the North Wales Medical School in 2024, Bangor is now bidding – jointly with Aberystwyth – to open a dental school on campus. The proposed model is community-centred and will go some way to addressing the shortage of dentists in North Wales. The proposal sits comfortably with Bangor’s wider push on medically related subjects. It has enrolled the first 30 of what it hopes will eventually be 100 students on its new Master of Pharmacy degree based in the medical school. These developments will only increase Bangor’s national appeal, as will the building of the new Albert Gubay Business School, work on which will begin soon following a £10.5m donation from the late philanthropist’s foundation. The school will have high-spec teaching spaces, a financial trading room, collaborative study areas and social learning spaces. Barely 40% of UK students come from Wales, despite the bursaries available for those learning in Welsh and dedicated Welsh-speaking halls. The university recruits strongly from England, particularly the North West, West Midlands and South East. However, the number admitted through UCAS in 2025 fell for the fourth successive year, dipping below 2,000 for the first time in more than a decade. Beyond medicine, Bangor’s academic profile is strongly linked to its location on the coast and next to the mountains of Snowdonia, with courses in forestry, adventure sport science, ocean science and marine conservation alongside more traditional subjects. Bangor even has its own marine research vessel called the RV Prince Madog. As well as offering distinctive academic opportunities, the university’s attractive setting makes it an appealing place for students who are into the great outdoors.

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 101. University of Sunderland – 64.1%

Overview

Another record year of applications in 2025 came as Sunderland opened its new London campus in the Canary Wharf financial district. With two campuses in Sunderland, an overseas outpost in Hong Kong and partnerships with a host of other institutions in 16 countries, Sunderland is expanding its horizons. Its bread and butter, however, continues to be to provide higher opportunities to many applicants (predominantly from the North East and Cumbria) who would be denied them elsewhere. The university has one of the most diverse student populations of any institution – about one quarter of last year’s intake were mature learners and more than half came from homes where parents have not gone to university. Degrees are vocationally focused and there are more than 1,000 degree apprentices on 30 different pathways. The London campus offers professionally focused courses in business, finance and tourism, as well as health-related programmes such as nursing and health and social care. Health – and medicine – are key offerings in Sunderland too, with the medical school working hard to diversify the traditionally middle-class entry profile to this most selective of professions. Plans announced in late 2025 will see health provision expand to include new training opportunities in dental care, and the university is launching a £4.2m eye health research unit, the Northern Ophthalmic Research and Innovation Institute. Library facilities for all students have been significantly upgraded, with a £2.4m investment in improved digital resources, collaborative zones and areas that enhance creativity and wellbeing. Four new degrees in business and events management, animal management and two MScis in biochemistry and pharmaceutical sciences admit their first students this September.

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102. University of Lincoln – 63.8%

Overview

Lincoln sparks the entrepreneurial spirit among its students, ranking fifth among universities in 2024-25 for the number of student start-ups registered. Last year’s success is no flash in the pan, with more than 1,100 student and graduate businesses created since 2014-15. Laurel Kavanagh, the university’s start-up and growth manager, attributes Lincoln’s success to a ‘deep dedication to promoting and empowering innovation, creativity and entrepreneurialism’. The start-up data is much the most impressive aspect of Lincoln’s graduate employment statistics. Admissions bounced back in September 2025 after taking a hit the previous year when Russell Group universities significantly expanded their intakes. The university is hugely popular in its immediate region (East Midlands, Humberside and East Anglia) from where more than 80% of its students are recruited. It is awaiting confirmation from the General Medical Council that it can award its own medical degrees, medicine having been offered here since 2018 with the degrees validated by the University of Nottingham. And the university is now expanding into dentistry to address the region’s acute dentistry crisis; a dental hygiene and therapy degree admits its first students in September this year to study in Lincoln’s new Institute of Dental and Oral Health. Elsewhere, it is making improvements to students’ campus experience through initiatives such as creating a dedicated services hub to make all student support accessible through a single location. Set on an attractive waterside campus at Brayford Pool, Lincoln is a student-friendly location. The long-running NatWest Student Living Index last year identified the city as the most affordable for students in the UK.

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103. University of Greater Manchester – 63.7%

Overview

From the new academic year, all courses at the University of Greater Manchester (UGM) will be delivered one module at a time. The so-called Greater Manchester Way moves the university to a block teaching model for its largely vocational course portfolio, with modules delivered in just five weeks, examination by in-class assessment and multi-choice quizzes with extensive use of peer and self-assessment rather than traditional exams. Lectures are replaced by a flipped classroom approach of task-driven activities. UGM is also a significant provider of degree apprenticeships and has just under 900 learners enrolled across seven programmes spanning health and social care, health and human sciences, nursing, youth work, computing, engineering and business. However, the university also faces significant issues. After more than one year suspended following an internal report from the university’s Fraud Response Panel, the university sacked its vice chancellor Prof George Holmes this month. Police are still investigating allegations of financial and other irregularities, and the Office for Students has launched an inquiry into ‘adequate and effective management and governance arrangements’. UGM sinks into the bottom three of our ranking this year. Applications and UCAS admissions dropped by 9% and 19% respectively in 2025 amid the uncertainty. The university had undergone a rebrand (opposed by some other local universities) in the previous year, morphing from the University of Bolton – the town where it is located – into the University of Greater Manchester to better project to a global audience its proximity to the bright lights of England’s second city. A new medical school admitted its first students – all of them international – last September, which will help put the university on the map when it comes to overseas recruitment. About three quarters of Greater Manchester’s socially diverse undergraduate intake comes from the North West.

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104. Royal Holloway, University of London – 62.7%

Overview

The verdant countryside campus and the architectural splendour of the Founder’s Building – modelled on a French chateau – make Royal Holloway a rather unlikely member of the University of London. Situated near Egham in 135 acres of grounds and about 40 minutes from central London by train, Royal Holloway applications and admissions are surging, having hit record levels in 2025. It models itself as a University of Social Purpose and takes pride in having an inclusive and close-knit community. The university makes the most of its natural assets, replanting several acres of meadow, woodland and ponds to improve the habitat for wildlife, increase biodiversity, and provide richer areas of nature in which students can relax or study outdoors. That emphasis on looking after student wellbeing manifests itself in a halls refurbishment programme that will give Runnymede and Reid halls a full makeover in time for September 2027 arrivals. New student lounges have been opened to create more social space, particularly for those living off campus, and lounges have been equipped with microwave ovens, fridges and boiling water taps. A new eatery has also opened in the Founder’s Building. Night skies here are dark enough for the university to have its own observatory, kitted out with a new telescope, while the psychology department has a new MRI scanner. Biological sciences students have benefited from upgraded laboratories and new teaching and study spaces. The university recruits a largely local clientele; three quarters of undergraduates admitted in September 2025 coming from London and the South East. About one third of the intake get some form of financial help, with the pot of funds available growing in 2025.

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105. Cardiff Metropolitan University – 62.6%

Overview

Applications and admissions to Cardiff Met are at record levels, up another 7% and 10% respectively last year. Our 2025 Welsh University of the Year, Cardiff Met is one of the UK’s leading sports universities offering outstanding facilities – including the National Indoor Athletics Centre – and a suite of sports courses for those wanting to take their talent into the classroom. Three new sports degrees – football coaching and performance, football performance and cricket performance management – are among 11 planned new programmes which will recruit their first students for September 2027. However, the university’s appeal extends well beyond sport alone, offering a breadth of courses spanning teacher training, health, sport, social and life sciences, technology, business and creative subjects. In addition to the two teaching campuses, Cyncoed and Llandaff, there is a third residential campus, Plas Gwyn. Ongoing upgrades to teaching spaces, sports facilities and student residences are aimed at improving the student experience and upping the university’s green credentials through a campus decarbonisation programme. A new ‘touchdown’ student social space has been created on the Cyncoed campus, changing rooms have been refurbished and a new broadcast gallery has opened for sports broadcast courses. Gas boilers are being replaced with electric heating systems and air source heat pumps, with solar panels added during roofing works. Cardiff Met recruits strongly from within Wales (56% of UK admissions in 2025), so most students need no introduction to the delights of Cardiff, which is currently one of the most popular student destinations in the UK.

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106. University of Kent – 61.6%

Overview

The University of Kent is now part of the London and South East University Group (LASE), a move that should do much to stabilise its finances. The advent of LASE on August 1 brings Kent together with the University of Greenwich, with which it already shares its Medway campus. Dubbed a ‘super university’, LASE is much more than an administrative detail. The merging of management operations at both universities will achieve considerable financial savings, pooling of resources, and in time should lead to new courses and other opportunities – welcome news after a period of underlying financial deficits and falling UCAS applications and admissions. One of the 1960s generation of universities, Kent recruits the bulk of its students from London and the South East to two attractive campuses on or close to the Kent coast. Headquartered in Canterbury, the university allocates students to one of seven colleges (six in Canterbury and Medway in Chatham), which are essentially social communities that break the student body into bite-sized chunks. Kent works hard to stay abreast of the latest needs of employers, reflected in the new degrees offered in September. These include an accelerated degree in business and management, criminology and criminal psychology, criminology with cybercrime, computer science (with specialisms in either robotics or games development) and sustainable societies and global sociology. In the same spirit, Kent has partnered with OpenAI to give students free access to ChatGPT Edu. All staff and students will complete a training module before getting the AI tool and receive ongoing guidance to encourage ethical and responsible use. The university is one of the larger providers of degree apprenticeships, with more than 1,100 learners on campus and plans to introduce new programmes, including one for youth workers.

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107. University of the Arts London – 61%

Overview

The University of the Arts London (UAL) continues to expand apace as admissions last year topped 6,000 for the first time – about 50% up on a decade ago. And what a decade it has been, with much of the fabric of this world-class institution now in keeping with its global status. The London College of Fashion’s (LCF’s) new campus in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, opened in 2023, is the most recent upgrade and puts the college at the heart of London’s newest boho quarter. By the time students arrive in September 2027, the London College of Communication (LCC) will have moved into its new premises, directly opposite its current site and at the heart of another London regeneration – in Elephant and Castle. The new LCC will be home to over 5,000 students and 500 staff, forming a creative hub for the area and offering world-class facilities for design, media and screen. UAL’s makeover began with the new Central St Martins (CSM) campus – the centrepiece of the reinvention of King’s Cross – in 2011. The university is made up of six colleges across the capital. In addition to LCF, LCC and CSM are three colleges of arts in Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon, all six varying largely in size. Wimbledon College of Arts has just six undergraduate programmes centred on theatrical direction, design and performance, while the LCF has more than 30 undergraduate fashion-related courses – from public relations and marketing to every aspect of design for menswear, womenswear, sportswear, knitwear and underwear. It’s a heady brew and no surprise that applications – drawn from across the world – rose again last year to another record. Graduates are hugely in demand, with end-of-year shows a magnet for the creative industries looking for the ‘next big thing’.

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108. Southampton Solent University – 60.2%

Overview

The January 2026 opening of Southampton Solent’s Smart Centre is hoped to be a gamechanger for this small but distinctive university. Applications and admissions have been falling post-pandemic and hit new lows for courses beginning in September 2025. But the Smart Centre brings new materials testing and composite laboratories, workshops and the latest equipment for the university’s engineering, maritime and yacht design students and apprentices. In keeping with a practice-led approach to higher education, students across a range of disciplines relevant to some of the UK’s biggest industries will get hands-on experience in subjects such as applied mechanics, renewable energy and robotics. The Smart Centre is also home to the South Coast Institute of Technology, a collaboration with the University of Portsmouth and four colleges, which offers qualifications from T-levels to degrees, and several pathways from further to higher education. Southampton Solent’s alignment with its coastal location is nowhere more evident than at the Warsash Maritime School, which offers more than 150 accredited deck, engineering, interior, maritime and offshore safety training courses. This is on top of the 24 undergraduate, postgraduate, and foundation degrees and diploma courses. Facilities are second to none and include bridge simulators and a unique ship handling centre, which features an 11-ship scaled model fleet used for training masters and pilots. The university even runs a bespoke open day just for those seeking a career on the high seas. It also has a strong showing in creative and media degrees, with new options starting in September including BScs in media technology and virtual production, journalism and content creation, and live event and audio engineering. Students have a new podcast studio to practise in, equipped with the latest cameras and mixing technology. Solent also has two dozen degree apprenticeship programmes and more than 500 enrolled apprentices.

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109. York St John University – 59.8%

Overview

York St John (YSJ) is the more historic of the city’s two universities, as the ‘Est 1841’ next to the university’s title gently reminds prospective students. Located close to the fabulous York Minster – where students get to graduate – YSJ is home to just under 7,000 undergraduates following a predominantly vocational range of courses. History is often close at hand and from this September, YSJ will expand into the Grade I listed King’s Manor, once visited by Henry VIII, which will become home to some of the university’s business and law courses. YSJ’s origin as a teacher training college is evident in the large numbers of students still on teaching degrees, but nursing and allied healthcare degrees are also a significant presence, with new programmes in midwifery and radiography admitting their first students in September 2026. Healthcare students have benefited from considerable upgrades to facilities recently, the latest of which include an MRI scanner, X-ray machine and midwifery and operating theatre suites. Elsewhere on campus, YSJ’s Design Centre has been expanded and modernised with new digital laboratories, studios and general teaching spaces. Two new design degrees – concept art and user experience design – are offered for the first time from September 2027. YSJ won a gold rating for student experience in the 2023 Teaching Excellence Framework assessments, and these recent improvements to facilities as well as upgrades to the Haxby Road Sports Park (including three new padel courts) aim to keep student satisfaction riding high. Applications and admissions were running at close to record levels in 2025, with two thirds of admissions drawn from Yorkshire and North East England.

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110. University of Sussex – 59.6%

Overview

Sussex is setting out its stall to attract environmentally conscious students. It has just launched the Sussex School for Progressive Futures to initiate and co-ordinate an interdisciplinary programme of education and research built around three themes – environmental sustainability, digital and data futures, and human flourishing. Its business school has become the first in the UK to embed the Sulitest into the curriculum, a new tool to measure, improve and certify levels of sustainability knowledge. The university has already introduced Climate Leaders Scholarships and the next generation of climate change activists can apply to Sussex’s new BA in climate justice, sustainability and development, which begins teaching in September. Further evidence of Sussex’s desire to shape and embrace the future can be seen in the university agreeing to a set of seven principles for AI in education, which combine driving further research in the field (where Sussex is already among the leading protagonists), setting out guidelines for ethical, inclusive and responsible usage, and establishing safeguards to protect staff and students from malicious use of AI. The university is on the edge of the South Downs, in Falmer, on the outskirts of the City of Brighton and Hove – arguably the most fashionable of all UK seaside destinations. One of the 1960s generation of universities, Sussex has plenty of the distinctive architecture for which the period was renowned, but there are also new student rooms under development to help keep the university fresh and modern. The first rooms in the new West Slope student accommodation come on stream in September, boosting the number of places in university-owned residences to close to 5,000.

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111. University of Westminster – 58.6%

Overview

The opening of Zone29, a new home in central London for the University of Westminster’s careers and enterprise teams, is hoped to be a game changer for the institution’s graduate employment record. Ranked outside of the top 100 for the number of graduates landing high-skilled jobs and the proportion believing their career to be on track, Zone29 should better enable Westminster to capitalise on its location at the heart of the UK economy. It will revolutionise Westminster’s engagement with business, industry and employers, bridging the gap between education and the business world. Employability has been embedded across the curriculum, with work-based and placement learning now built into the first and second year of all degrees alongside optional year-long experiences. And by bringing key careers and enterprise support into a single building, the university hopes to make it easier for students to get the support they need for securing employment after graduation. This is especially important for a university with Westminster’s social profile: around half of recruits are the first in their immediate family to go to university and three quarters are drawn from ethnic minorities. They are based on four campuses: three of them in central London (Cavendish, Marylebone and Regent) and one in Harrow, north west London. About one in six undergraduates admitted in September 2025 came from overseas, helping to make the university as cosmopolitan as the city it stands in. Alongside its strongly vocational portfolio of degrees, Westminster has embraced degree apprenticeships as a pathway for students keen to avoid the burden of debt. By September 2027, the university expects to have 850 apprentices enrolled across 11 programmes spanning construction, real estate and healthcare.

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112. Abertay University – 58.3%

Overview

Abertay was ranked as the top university in Europe for games design by the influential Princeton Review last year. The US education services company ranked it 8th globally, behind only American institutions. In 2027, it will be 30 years since Abertay pioneered the first degrees in video/computer games education – and the specialism remains the university’s most fabled academic offering. Dundee-born David Jones – creator of one of the best-selling game franchises ever, Grand Theft Auto – helped set up the world’s first computer gaming degree at Abertay. Today, computing-related courses make up nine of the 52 undergraduate degrees there, with most others largely focused on accounting, business management, food, psychology and sport and fitness. A new sports therapy laboratory has been opened in the past year, supporting hands-on skills development for students in sports therapy and related disciplines, offering industry-standard equipment, treatment benches, rehabilitation stations and controlled practical environments. Meanwhile, the newly launched Cylera and Cisco Command Centre enhances Abertay’s digital infrastructure and cybersecurity capabilities, offering students exposure to real-world cybersecurity environments. The university has enjoyed considerable recent success in the National Student Survey, ranking in the UK top 40 once again this year on all three measures we include in our ranking covering teaching excellence, student support and student experience. With fewer than 3,500 full-time undergraduates, Abertay is one of the smallest universities in the UK, which fosters a hugely supportive learning environment. However, this year’s hefty drop in its overall ranking is due to hugely disappointing graduate outcomes as less than 60% of graduates are in high-skilled jobs, placing Abertay in the UK’s bottom 20 on this measure. Based on a compact city centre campus in Scotland’s sunniest city, the university is at the heart of a vibrant site that has seen considerable recent development.

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113. Liverpool Hope University – 57.8%

Overview

Liverpool Hope is deeply rooted in its Merseyside community, from which it draws 60% of its students. Its main Hope Park campus in leafy Childwall is a stylish and green affair with academic, social and residential buildings in close proximity. A second site in Everton is home to Hope’s Creative Campus, with a third (purely residential) campus at Aigburth Park. Acceptances for places beginning this September were up 25%, recouping much of the ground lost in a disappointing recruitment cycle for September 2025. The university is the antithesis of many large, faceless civic universities in large metropolitan areas. Its 5,000 students are all known by name and Hope fosters a supportive culture where they are encouraged to perform at their best. They appreciate this, returning consistently outstanding results in the National Student Survey, which places Hope among the top-ranked universities in this guide for teaching excellence, student support and student experience. It was a strong contender this year to be our University of the Year for Student Support. The new i3 Building at Hope Park combines flexible teaching space with lecture theatres; multiple student workspaces, including areas for collaborative work; and classrooms equipped with the latest digital technology. It also contains a Simulation Lab, where interactive walls will transport students to laboratories, museums or spaces for wellbeing activities. A digital upgrade will be rolled out across all sites over the next academic year to benefit everything from digital learning through to appointment management. ‘The community feeling here is really special,’ Prof Penny Haughan, the newly appointed vice chancellor, told us. ‘We offer opportunities to students who would struggle to get them anywhere else. We take the approach that one size does not fit all and every student is different.’

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114. University of Bedfordshire – 57.1%

Overview

A smaller University of Bedfordshire has emerged from the financial crisis engulfing higher education. But it remains committed to social inclusion and the vocational education model for which it was best known, despite a 30% fall in income in a single year in 2024-25. Bedfordshire promises students a ‘Career Powered Education’ and aims to deliver it through modern facilities, teachers with professional expertise in their field, real-time industry projects and comprehensive careers support with lifetime access to the university careers service. This emphasis on practice-based learning will be expected to improve students’ employment outcomes, with Bedfordshire in the bottom 20 for the proportion of graduates (57.1%) landing high-skilled jobs. A good example of its investment in this approach is the School of Computing, Engineering and Creative Industries’ launch of a Security Operations Centre in January, developed with industry partners. The facility will replicate real-world cybersecurity operations, allowing students to engage directly with simulated cyber incidents across the full threat lifecycle. A new AI data centre is due to launch this month, providing advanced computational infrastructure to support teaching, research and industry collaboration in AI. And a Community Diagnostic Centre is set to open on the Luton campus in early 2027. As well as benefitting the local community, this will provide placement and learning opportunities for the university’s large number of healthcare students. They have already gained the Brewster Square simulation suite on the Luton campus, designed as a street with mock houses and flats, a police custody suite, a hospital ward, an operating theatre and a community-based clinic. The university continues to have a significant presence in teacher training (on the Bedford campus), nursing, midwifery and healthcare (Luton, Bedford and Aylesbury) and sport, with the university partnering Luton Town Football Club and Bedford Blues Rugby Club.

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115. SOAS University of London – 56.6%

Overview

Uniquely in British higher education, Soas views the world through the prism of Africa, Asia and the Middle East; places at the centre of many of the world’s most intractable problems. Even before the events of 2026, applications to Soas were at record levels and that seems unlikely to change. The university attracts an ethnically diverse intake with strong recruitment from overseas; international students make up around 30% of undergraduates. Seven new management degrees offered from September 2026 demonstrate the breadth, uniqueness and quirkiness of Soas’s academic provision, combining the study of management with languages rarely taught elsewhere – Arabic, Chinese, Korean or Japanese – and arts subjects – film studies, creative art and music. Situated in Bloomsbury, in the heart of London, Soas is close to all the facilities of the University of London. Campus amenities have been heavily upgraded in the past two years. A new study skills learning lounge has opened, offering drop-ins with study skills lecturers, bookable study skills workshops, pods for private study, rooms for group study and screens for practising presentations. And the university continues to upgrade formal and informal study spaces across campus, including the Sir Denys Lasdun-designed library, adding a new commons area to support informal collaborative work. The brutalist-style landmark – one of just five higher education National Research Libraries in the UK and a global resource – contains more than 1.5m books or items in 400 languages, all of them focused on Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

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116. Norwich University of the Arts – 56.4%

Overview

Norwich University of the Arts was the top-ranked specialist arts institution at this year’s Whatuni Student Choice Awards (WUSCAs), ranking 14th overall in the UK based on student opinion. Universities are judged on the quality of teaching, student support, facilities, career prospects and campus life. Its WUSCAs success follows our recognition of the university as our Arts University of the Year two years ago for its all-round excellence and focus on graduate employability in the creative industries. Based in the centre of Norwich, the university is home to less than 2,700 undergraduates following a compact portfolio of 29 degrees. These cover the performing arts, visual arts, televisual arts, design and fashion. Norwich also offers programmes in creative computing, AI and robotics plus user experience design, marrying creativity to the digital age in areas with a shortage of graduates. Norwich is one of five specialist arts universities in this guide and the only one to secure a triple gold rating in assessments for the 2023 Teaching Excellence Framework, covering an overall rating and scores for student support and experience. Several new facilities have recently come on stream, giving students hands-on experience of tools that are shaping digital media. These include a Creative Tech Lab to allow experimentation with cutting-edge technology including 3D scanners, projectors, sound controllers, motion capture devices and haptic feedback devices. A virtual production studio lets them try immersive filmmaking, real-time visualisation and interactive media creation, while a new Esports Lab supports everything from practice matches to full tournaments, with its high-performance rigs and professional broadcast suite. Separately, a new library and gallery will open soon in the historic Bank Plain building, already at the centre of student life as home to the students’ union, student support services and food outlets.

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117. Goldsmiths, University of London – 56%

Overview

Following another year of industrial action, a 32-day library sit-in by students and administrative turmoil, Goldsmiths will hope that the appointment of a new vice chancellor, Prof Joanna Newman, will steady the ship. She takes up her role in September this year, 11 months after her predecessor, Prof Frances Corner, resigned with immediate effect, just a fortnight after she said she would be leaving at the end (rather than the start) of the 2025-26 academic year. Goldsmiths, one of the UK’s leading creative universities, has been hit by cuts to jobs and courses as it struggles to balance its budget. It introduced a new faculty structure two years ago to stimulate opportunities and improve the student experience. But continued lacklustre showings in the National Student Survey suggest there is still a lot of work to be done. Goldsmiths ranked in the bottom 20 in the UK again this year for student experience, although scores for satisfaction with teaching quality showed improvement. UCAS admissions in September 2025 bottomed out at the same record-low level as the previous year, but applications continued to slump even further. Based on an attractive campus in New Cross Gate, Goldsmiths has a reputation for turning out some of the country’s brightest young creatives. Nine alumni have won the Turner Prize, Britain’s premier arts award. These successes have helped preserve the university’s international clout, with overseas tuition fee income accounting for 62% of all tuition fee revenues in 2024-25. Having so many international students on campus gives the university a cosmopolitan feel. It’s socially diverse, too, with one of the highest proportions of students from ethnic minorities of any university. Alongside a multitude of creative and performing arts degrees, Goldsmiths also offers computing, AI, politics, economics and marketing.

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118. London Metropolitan University – 54.7%

Overview

Although UCAS intakes have fallen for five successive years, London Met has maintained its record for having one of the most socially diverse student populations that reflects the city in which it stands – and from which it draws 75% of its intake. Black students were by far the largest ethnicity in the Class of September 2025 recruited to London Met’s three campuses in north London and on the City’s fringes. All campuses have had significant investment recently and the School of Art, Architecture and Design (AAD) now operates across all three. Shoreditch is home to fine art, fashion and textiles, while Holloway houses photography, graphics and visual communication, as well as other digital and computing subjects to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration. Aldgate now provides modernised, flexible learning and teaching spaces for a small number of AAD courses in the Wash Houses building and Goulston Street. Students enrolling in September 2026 will be the first to benefit from the Heart of the Campus project on the Holloway campus, featuring a new main entrance and plaza and technology-enabled social learning spaces. Students are split between six academic schools – computing and digital media; human sciences; social sciences and professions; business and law; the built environment; and art, architecture and design. The vocational course portfolio is regularly updated to keep abreast of the jobs market. Courses often include a foundation year to widen access for applicants without the grades to progress straight on to a three-year degree. New courses recruiting for a September 2026 start include a BEng in product design engineering with or without a foundation year and as a top-up degree option, and AI with the same variants. There are also two new nursing degrees – a BSc in children’s nursing and a MSci in adult and mental health nursing.

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119. University of Roehampton, London – 54.6%

Overview

Roehampton offers a different London university experience. An attractive parkland campus in the south west of the capital attracts a steady stream of applicants each year and those that enrol enjoy their time there. The university ranks well above its overall position in our league table for its National Student Survey-based rankings for teaching excellence, student support and student experience. It also ranked 1st in London for student life in this year’s Whatuni Student Choice Awards, voted there by its own students. Adding ‘London’ to its formal title in the past year will help the university market itself overseas and to potential recruits from outside of London and the South East, from where 90% of its diverse intake comes. Two thirds of students are from ethnic minority backgrounds. New facilities include the Dorothy Buchanan Building, home to the Sustainable Engineering and Technology Centre, which features digital and environmental laboratories, engineering and fabrication workshops, computer-aided design suites, project studios and creative breakout areas. Students will use an immersive, project-based approach to tackle real-world challenges in sustainability, computing and the built environment. The introduction of a new BEng degree in civil and environmental engineering in September this year speaks to that. Roehampton is seeking to improve on one of the poorer showings in our graduate employment rankings by working closely with employers through an Industry Advisory Board to ensure that courses are aligned with employers’ needs and produce job-ready graduates. Roehampton has four colleges – Digby Stuart, Froebel, Southlands and Whitelands – which breaks an already small undergraduate population of about 7,000 into even more manageable numbers. Founded as teacher training colleges in the 19th century, that area of study is still key here, alongside healthcare subjects, social sciences, business and computing.

120. Arts University Plymouth – 54.2%

Overview

Arts University Plymouth (AUP) is our 2027 Arts University of the Year in recognition of its key contribution to arts specialist education in South West England. It is one of the smallest universities in our guide, housing both further and higher education on its city centre campus, and providing clear pathways between the two. AUP using seasoned practitioners to deliver many of its narrow range of creative courses makes for an engaging learning experience. The university works hard to link creative study to industry and progression into professional practice. Next month’s introduction of a BA in content creation is the latest example of this approach and is designed to equip graduates with video, photographic, audio, animation and written content skills, alongside an understanding of branding, audience engagement and data-informed content planning. The course will be delivered using live briefs, students will be trained in pitching, pricing and professional collaboration and will have opportunities to be paid where work is commissioned. The university supports creative entrepreneurs through its Workroom Grow business incubator, while Workroom Create offers specialist facilities to alumni to allow them to still be part of AUP’s creative ecosystem as they develop their professional careers. The university’s city centre campus has 13,000 square metres of studios and workshops across four buildings. The socially diverse intake features one of the highest proportions of students from homes where parents did not go to university. For the past five years, AUP has been the top-performing arts specialist institution in the National Student Survey for the past five years based on student opinion on teaching quality, student support and their wider experience. The university will hope this year’s reverse, particularly in ratings for teaching quality and student experience, is just a one-off, or artist’s licence as you might say.

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121. Arts University Bournemouth – 52.5%

Overview

Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) is doing its best to help get graduates into the working world, addressing the employment challenges often faced by young creatives head-on. The university’s Innovation Studio is home to several graduate start-ups which benefit from a free three-month incubator programme. Meanwhile, the School of Fashion and Creative Industries Management has partnered with the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) to offer students a dual accreditation across all of its undergraduate courses. That means the courses have been certified by the CMI as aligning with professional qualifications and standards, giving students CMI foundation chartered manager status on completing their degree. The university is also setting up an agency in the town to offer creative services to external organisations, which will give students and recent graduates opportunities to work on live commissions across design, media and production. All these initiatives should go a long way towards addressing the common challenge for arts specialist universities of a bottom-ten ranking for graduate employment in high-skilled jobs. Three successive falls in applications could be reversed by a new suite of integrated foundation year options available on 24 of AUB’s best-known degrees. While broadening the university’s intake, the year will give students the skills to progress on to degree programmes after. One of five specialist arts universities in this guide, AUB’s has a significant profile in film, performance arts, photography, graphic design, art and games art, illustration, fashion, creative writing and media. A recent £1.25m investment from the Office for Students was made in the Bournemouth Film School, the UK’s largest film school outside of London. Based at the Elliott Road Studios, close to campus, the cash will significantly enhance the university’s screen and production facilities, with particular benefits for those whose studies encompass virtual production, performance capture and immersive media.

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