King’s College London named in the top 10 most reputable universities in UK

King’s has been named in a list of the top 10 most reputable universities in UK, according to academics.

The results of The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings were announced earlier this month.

As many as 55,000 academics from across the globe voted in these rankings, and it’s official: King’s College London came in seventh place.

This is ahead of Warwick, Bristol and Manchester – who are all also in the top 10 for Russell Groups universities.

This is a great result in comparison to our ranking by the Daily Mail, who ranked us 13th in their university league table. And let’s not forget, King’s is the number one university for sociology and social policy in 2025.

However, globally in The Times Higher Education World Reputation Rankings, KCL placed 36th.

Of course, Oxford and Cambridge are the top two and unsurprisingly, Cambridge has the fourth best reputation of any university in the world. Oxford is joint second.

Times Higher Education didn’t assign ranks to the universities outside of the top 100, instead grouping them into bands. The results for the reputation of each Russell Group University that isn’t in the top one hundred look like this:

• The 101-150 group: Durham University, the University of Glasgow, the University of Leeds, the University of Nottingham and the University of York.
• The 150-200 group: Cardiff University, Newcastle University, Queen Mary University of London, the University of Exeter, the University of Sheffield, and the University of Southampton.
• The 201-300 group: Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Birmingham, and the University of Liverpool.

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All of the Russell Group’s seem to be renowned enough to get into the top 300 most reputable universities. That said, there are three non Russell Group unis that managed to make their way into the global top 200: University of St Andrews, the University of Reading, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Reputation isn’t everything, and if you happen to go to one of the lower-ranking universities, that is okay – rankings tend to be a summary, as opposed to a precise measure.

To look more at the quality of the University itself, as opposed to its reputation, you can look at Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings.

KCL places at joint 36th in the world, and sixth in the UK quality wise. This is a result of KCL’s high scores of 97.2/100 for both research quality and international outlook, despite its lower score of 60.1 for teaching.

Going to a prestigious university definitely does not hurt your future career prospects. So, we shouldn’t completely ignore reputation when it comes to choosing a university.

The top 10 Russell Group universities with the highest reputations are:

10. University of Warwick (95th in the world)

9. University of Bristol (68th)

8. University of Manchester (50th)

7. King’s College London (joint 42nd)

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)

Featured image via David Iliff on Creative Commons (Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0) and Colin on Creative Commons