University rankings

Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh and King’s College London all appear in the bottom 20 for student satisfaction despite their global reputations

Queen’s University Belfast scores just 20 for graduate employment outcomes – while Oxford, Cambridge and LSE all achieve a perfect 100, according to the QS 2027 rankings

Queen’s Belfast rose 25 places to rank 174th globally – while Southampton fell 24 to 111th, the biggest drop of any Russell Group university this year

Oxford, which tops the overall university rankings, ranks 21st for facility spend, while Exeter leads all Russell Group universities at 57 per cent

Plymouth Marjon scores 13 percentage points below second-placed Roehampton, a gap larger than the entire spread between positions two and twenty on the list

Oxford makes £198m more from research grants than from tuition fees – while LSE, despite ranking third for research quality, brings in the least research income of any Russell Group university

Arts University Plymouth ranked worst for graduate prospects, with just 46 per cent of graduates finding success after leaving

Edinburgh follows at 30.4 per cent, meaning Scotland’s two most internationally renowned universities have the smallest proportion of Scottish students of any institution in the country

At Queen Mary, 5.8 per cent of first year students do not continue their studies – the highest dropout rate of any Russell Group university, and nearly three times the rate at Cambridge

Newcastle, Sheffield and Manchester also rank in the bottom five, with ratios above 13