[joefarish]

I'm not saying it's wrong but people are reacting to this as if the Times university guide is some objective truth.

Regarding the potential lowering of standards for widening participation purposes, this doesn't change the fact that the entry standards for Oxford and Cambridge are still higher than LSE and St. Andrews.

[afavour]

I don't know anyone at Oxford but do have friends who work in higher education. From what I hear from them Brexit has turned UK higher education upside down when it comes to funding and research. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is a consequence of some universities navigating that better than others.

But you don't get anywhere near as much online outrage with that theory so "leftists are ruining western civilisation" wins out again.

[fatfox]

Yes I’d agree with that. International student income dropped, rounds of layoffs.

Some universities are better at optimising for rankings, see also REF research funding and how much effort and resources are spent on it, which varies by university: https://2029.ref.ac.uk/about/what-is-the-ref/

[tialaramex]

Government decided it doesn't want to pay for tertiary education. But, it does want UK students to get tertiary education, and they can't afford it. So, OK that circle can be kinda squared by "student loans" except of course the cost on these loans would sky-rocket. So, then government says ah, you can't charge more than this small fixed amount, and we'll never increase it because that's unpopular. For-profit lenders can charge as much as they can find an excuse for, but you educational charities too bad, you're not getting an extra penny.

So a good UK university cannot profitably offer education for UK students.

So for some of the best they'll focus on non UK students. These students aren't subject to a capped price we can't afford, so we can gouge them to make up for the lost revenue from home students.

But the usual "I'm not racist but..." people of course hate foreigners. How dare any of these people be different in any way. And so while some of them will pretend their hatred only extends to some foreigners it's always the same exact people who are aggrieved and want yet another excuse to hate foreigners.

This results in government efforts to make it harder to study here, and more expensive to teach students here. That way they slightly appease racists who weren't going to vote for them anyway and they feel justified.

I assume eventually this will collapse, and judging from Brexit nothing whatsoever will be learned by the supporter/victim class, the same gullible morons will keep falling for lies from the same people who feed off them. Certain that somehow it must be somebody else's fault their lives are shit while the leaders they're feeding are doing so well.

[smcin]

Where can you anecdotally find out about the accept/reject rate by students offered places? in particular I read the preference for UK universities by international students nosedeived ~2021 when the UK govt + universities said they couldn't even guarantee them either a definite visa during/after graduation, and fees went up.

[t_luke]

All the UK university ranking systems use basically the same data — the National Student Survey (NSS) which measures students' impression of teaching quality, the Graduate Outcomes Survey (GOS) which measures employment 15 months after graduation, and a bunch of standard data collected by HESA — entry standards, whether students complete their degrees, average degree classifications, etc.

Much of this data is extremely 'gameable', and a lot of the 'alpha' between successful and less successful institutions is being 'good at surveys.' e.g. for NSS, between comparable institutions it's really a question of how good they are at getting students to complete the survey (students mostly ignore it, and you lose marks for poor completion rates).

Of course — it should also go without saying that there is no 'correct' weighting for any of this data, and depending on how you weight the different indicators, the rankings change.

[cal85]

> I'm not saying it's wrong but people are reacting to this as if the Times university guide is some objective truth.

I can’t see a single example of anyone reacting to it that way.