The Russell Group unis with the best reputations in 2025, as voted by professors

Gals, we finally have an official guide as to which Russell Group unis have the best reputations in 2025 and will impress your grandparents the most. Times Higher Education got over 55,000 academics from across the world to vote for the universities they think have the best reputations, then ranked all the unis. Treat this as a guide to which unis will look the most impressive on your LinkedIns. Or which unis you can brag to your neighbours about getting offers from.

The good news is that there does seem to be a point to studying harder for your A-Levels and going to an academic Russell Group uni. All 24 Russell Group unis are among the 300 universities in the world with the best reputation. Most of them scored fairly well, too. The University of St Andrews, the University of Reading, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine are the only non-Russell Group unis to make it into the top 200.

Unsurprisingly, Oxbridge has a big reputation, big reputation (sorry, I couldn’t write a whole article about reputations without making a Taylor Swift reference). The University of Cambridge officially has the fourth best reputation of any uni in the world. Slay. The University of Oxford just beat it and came joint second with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (aka MIT). Only Harvard University has a better reputation.

Some Cambridge students looking extra Cambridgey

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Outside the top 100 universities in the world for reputation, Times Higher Education didn’t assign unis a specific rank, but grouped them into bands. So, Durham University, the University of Glasgow, the University of Leeds, the University of Nottingham and the University of York were in the 101-150 group. Cardiff University, Newcastle University, Queen Mary University of London, the University of Exeter, the University of Sheffield, and the University of Southampton made it into the 150-200 band. Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Birmingham, and the University of Liverpool are officially the three least impressive Russell Group unis with the worst reputation. They only made it into the 201-300 group.

Here are the ten Russell Group unis with the best reputations in 2025, according to actual academics. The numbers in brackets are their overall position in the world.

10. University of Warwick (95th)

9. University of Bristol (68th)

8. University of Manchester (50th)

7. King’s College London (joint 42nd)

Clearly these King’s students are smiling because their uni scored so highly in Times Higher Education’s world reputation rankings

6. London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) (joint 36th)

5. University of Edinburgh (30th)

4. University College London (UCL) (25th)

3. Imperial College London (14th)

2. University of Cambridge (joint 4th)

1. University of Oxford (joint 2nd)

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