Cambridge is Britain's top university, followed by Imperial College, in third place, Oxford University, then the London School of Economics and University College, London, according to a Financial Times survey of British universities.
Northern Ireland's universities are down the list a piece. Queen's University Belfast is ranked 36th and the University of Ulster comes in at 54th, out of a total of 97 institutions. The universities were graded on performance across 16 categories, including entry requirements, standards of teaching and research, student/staff ratios, research income and the amount of money spent on books and computers.
All the figures have been taken from officially published statistics - from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, UCAS and funding councils. Although Northern Ireland's universities have performed relatively poorly in the league table, UU is ranked fifth in the applications-to-places category, which aims to gauge the level of demand for a university's courses; UU has a high 10.21 applications for every place. QUB also comes fifth in one category, the percentage of graduates entering higher degree courses (17.6 per cent). The University of Edinburgh is the best performing Scottish university. It is ranked eighth, followed by the University of St Andrews at 17th and Heriot-Watt University, 20th on the list. The league table - the newspaper calls it the FT 100 - ranks all Britain's former polytechnics below the old universities. Robert Gordon University is the highest-placed former polytechnic at 57th, just behind Goldsmiths College, London, the lowest placed of the old universities. The top 10 former polytechnics include the University of Westminster, De Montfort University and Liverpool John Moores University. There's some comfort, though, for the former polytechnics, which all were granted university status in 1992. The FT points out that although they are outperformed overall by the old universities, individual institutions are showing that in their chosen specialities they can compete with Britain's top universities.
