See where your uni placed in this year’s National Student Survey rankings

The University of Buckingham and the Royal Veterinary College share the top spot with St Andrews in this year’s National Student Survey student satisfaction rankings, amid boycotts, protests, and declining responses.

Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, UCL, Sheffield, and King’s are among the institutions missing from the rankings.

12 major universities boycotted the survey over its links to increased tuition fees, and several Russell Group universities also fell down the rankings, as only two thirds of students nationwide completed the survey.

Results in full

[infogram id=”f8135668-32c6-4709-8ab7-0c6a2178fe63″ prefix=”ol3″ format=”interactive” title=”NSS Table”]

Among the univeristies who completed the survey, the University of Buckingham, the Royal Veterinary College and the University of St Andrews scored the highest. Writtle University and Glasgow School of Art however placed at the bottom of the table. Fewer than 50 per cent of final year undergrads failed to complete the survey at the 12 missing institutions, meaning their university data was unpublishable.

Deborah Johnston of SOAS was amongst academics criticising the rankings’ usefulness in the wake of the boycott, saying that “using data which is not reportable for the 2017 student survey does raise additional issues about the robustness of the framework as a measure of quality.”

Around 300,000 students took part in the survey, 12,000 less than in 2016, meaning the response rate dropped from 72 per cent to 68 per cent. The results of the NSS were to be used to rank and award the high achieving universities ‘bronze’, ‘silver’ or ‘gold’. Bronze and above universities would then be entitled to raise their tuition fees by up to £250 in the 2017-2018 academic year. As 12 universities are missing from the results, the government does not have reliable and accurate data to determine where they raise tuition fees.