The perfect university league table doesn’t exis-

University league tables aren’t perfect.

Some both within and outside of higher education would say that they are terrible: blunt tools for the sole purpose of perpetuating competition and marketisation of a sector that desperately needs anything but competition and marketisation.

Others would say that they can be a useful tool in helping prospective students apply to university.

Either way, they don't seem like they're going away any time soon.

What league tables are out there at the moment?

At an international level, world rankings such as THE and QS, are primarily focused on research and reputation. Within the UK, domestic ‘league tables’ such as the Guardian and Complete University Guide tend to focus a lot more on teaching.

The Guardian, whose updated table came out last week, very much position themselves as helping prospective students choose where to go to university:

“This guide is different from the other university guides you may have come across because it is aimed specifically at students who are trying to choose a course.” ( Guardian website)

The new table has gathered much interest due to the fact that St. Andrews has overtaken Oxford. Some of the other big surprises have been summarised by Paul Greatrix for his piece on Wonkhe. This encapsulates another criticism used against league tables – they change their methodology just enough so that each new edition can produce some new headlines. Although, I suppose they would argue that they’re making improvements to improve the credibility of the rankings.

Creating a league table that can actually help prospective students find the right university for them

The biggest issue that I have with league tables is that each prospective student will care about different things. A league table may work for the average student… but as we know, no such thing exists.

So what if each prospective student could create a league table for themselves…? Yeah – let’s do that!

Methodology

Thankfully, the Guardian League Table gives us a good starting place to try this out, as they make the scores available for each of the categories that make up their overall rankings. They also have a handy explanation of their methodology.

So, here’s the principle: give prospective students the chance to say which factors are important and how important they are… then build a league table off of this.

So, why not give it a try?

This Google Sheet works by taking the scores that users give to each aspect of the university experience and then building a unique set of weightings, based on those scores.

So, that's a start - but where do we go from here?

We may have made some progress, but as we're only using metrics supplied by the Guardian League Table, we're still missing out on so much. There are many human factors that prospective students take into their decision:

• How far away from home is it?
• Do they have the particular society / sports club that I’m looking to continue at university?
• How expensive will it be to live there?
• Is it city-based, campus-based, multi-campus-based, etc.?
• Do I know any friends who will be studying there / or have studied there?
• Will there be people like me there?

Some other rankings, such as the old THE Student Experience ranking try to accommodate some of these factors by using surveys of current students to gather more data on a wider array of topics. The validity of such student surveys will have to wait for another day.

Furthermore, most students will have an idea of the subject that they want to study and so basing scores off subject-data where possible is much more reliable than using university averages.

Also, while a more tailored league table might provide a short list for students, ultimately there will be too many factors to quantify into an undisputed ranking

Next steps

1.      What else needs to be considered to make a personalised league table as helpful as it can possibly be for prospective students?

2.      What’s a better platform to build this thing on, instead of Google Sheets?

3.      Does anyone really like crunching data and want to make V 2.0 with me?

4.      Will league tables always be more confusing and damaging than they are helpful?

Thanks so much for reading and please do leave any thoughts as comments. I really appreciate it.