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Editor's Notes

1. Which is the best university? According to the Times, it’s Oxford. Except last year on a Sunday, because, according to the Sunday Times, it was Cambridge. Maybe it doesn’t matter which it is, so long as we can at least agree it’s one of the two. Although anybody here in the engineering or technology sectors, might actually want to make a case for Imperial. And any business services companies may think it’s LSE, say. For certain other subjects or in certain other industries or, you might say it’s Exeter, Durham, UEA or York. We can at least agree the best university must be in the Russell Group. Except, erm, Exeter, Durham, UEA and York aren’t in the Russell Group. They are, however, in the 1994 Group. So the best university must be in one of those Groups. It must be one of those 30 or so universities. Although, of course, now we haven’t narrowed our choice down very much – we’ve got about a quarter of all universities. And there are some notable names still left out. The Open University isn’t on the list��– and you may be okay with that – but if student satisfaction is an important factor in determining the best uni, it is unarguably the most consistently high-performing since the start of the National Student Survey. Also I’m not sure everyone would find their best uni on this list. Imagine I’m a woman. Black, working-class, in my forties, living in Gateshead with two kids and a job – and I want to study a part-time degree in social work. Most of the names on our list are among the worst unis I could choose. They don’t do the course, they don’t do part-time, they’re hundreds of miles from home, they have little or no child-care, and all the ethnic and social mix of a gymkana in Royal Tonbridge Wells. If Sunderland Uni isn’t on the list, it’s not got the best uni for me.
2. This is the main problem with league tables. They’re based on the idea that there is such a thing as the best uni in the country. This is a journalistic exercise because everyone loves a good list and lists sells papers. It mustn’t be too radical, or else it won’t have any credibility. They are NOT useful from a careers guidance perspective because they iron out differences rather than reflecting them. Many of the problems relate to the fact that the league tables are an aggregation of available stats, which are used as indicators of things they’re not measuring. For example, there is no assessment of teaching in universities. So the league table tend to use the percentage of 1sts and 2:1s instead as if that told you anything about teaching standards. Who are these tables for? It’s not helpful to students because it doesn’t tell them which uni is suitable for them. The same applies to employers. Indeed, I’d argue this false impression is positively damaging. Feel free to ask me why later.
3. League tables are a relic of an age when 6% of the country went to uni to study PPE or classics in ivory towers. That HE sector was totally unfit for the challenges of the 21 st century. Fortunately, that’s not what we have any more. We have universities as diverse as Bolton and Birkbeck. These cater for a wider diversity of students, because talent is not restricted to a white male 18-year old middle class. They teach different courses, because in a world where many employers aren’t willing to train someone for years only have them pinched by their competitor, we need to plug the gap which once would have been filled by old fashioned apprenticeships and the years following. They teach in diverse ways – part-time, at a distance, one-to-one tutorials – responding to different students learning patterns.