Revealed: How UK unis rank worldwide

Cambridge, Oxford, UCL and Imperial all made the top 10 unis in the world – but the rest of us didn’t do so well.

Former bigshots York, Exeter, Liverpool and Exeter didn’t even make the top 100, according to the QS world rankings.

Meanwhile Leicester and UEA didn’t even get 200th place globally.

On the brighter side, Manchester, Bristol, Warwick, Glasgow and Leeds all scraped into the top 100.

But one of the biggest casualties is Imperial, with was ranked joint second with Cambridge last year.

And now they’ve slipped down the table into 8th place.

Forget Harvard or Stanford, the very best uni in the world is officially the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Meanwhile the worst uni in the world and somewhere you might want to avoid on your year abroad is Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea.

The worst uni to go to in the UK is St. George’s, University of London.

Previously the QS rankings preferred unis with strong research and medical departments, but this has been changed to represent arts and humanities too.

QS World University rankings are considered the best rating system of their kind.

John O’Leary, member of the QS global advisory board said: “The UK remains second only to the US as a higher education destination.

“The leading universities may have lost ground, but they still make up four of the top 10 in the world.

“Ironically, their strength in medicine and science has cost some of them because the new methodology rewards a more balanced portfolio, but it is good news for the likes of Durham and Warwick, as well as LSE.”

The US got 49 unis in the top 200, while we only managed 30.

Despite this, four of the top 50 can all be found in London – now the world’s cleverest city – which even led Mayor Boris Johnson to get involved.

He boasted: “London is unequivocally the education capital of the world.”