The 2015 Complete University guide has ranked Lancaster 11th best in the UK, and the number one university in North West. The guide included 123 different Universities across the UK and ranked them in terms of nine categories, including student satisfaction, research assessment and entry standards.
This follows the announcement that Lancaster was awarded a top ten place in the Times Higher Education’s ‘100 under 50’ rankings, a system that ranks all of the top 100 higher education institutions which are under 100 years old.
Lancaster’s score of 866 was enough for 11th place on the list, just four points behind 10th placed Exeter and four points in front of 12th place Surrey. Cambridge topped the list, followed closely by Oxford, whilst St Andrews in fourth and Durham in fifth were the only two northern based Universities inside the top ten.
Lancaster’s position of 11th is the same as last year’s ranking, but still two short of ninth position in 2013. The University’s peak came in 2011 when it held eight place on the table, just three years after it had finished 19th.
Lancaster’s position as number one in the North West was far more comfortable, finishing ahead of Manchester (25th), Liverpool (31st) and Manchester Metropolitan (73rd).
The guide also produced separate, individual tables for 67 subjects including Marketing, for which Lancaster was deemed the best in the country for the second year in a row.
Lancaster University Management School’s Department of Marketing is the longest established in the UK and following the announcement of the results, the department responded to the positive feedback, tweeting: “ Thankyou [sic] – we are rather pleased with ourselves!”
Lancaster were ranked top 10 in the country for 12 of the 31 subjects that it offers, with Social Work in second place, both Art and Design and Linguistics in third place and Communication and Media Studies in fourth place. Meanwhile Accounting and Finance achieved a fifth place position; Business and Management Studies came in seventh place; and Drama, Dance and Film Studies and Religious Studies both coming in 8th place. Physics, Sociology and Geography and Environmental Science all received ninth place positions in the table.
Subject tables were ranked in terms of entry standards, student satisfaction, research assessment and graduate prospects, forming an overall score at the end. Other factors taken into account into the ratio between the number of staff and number of students; the amount of money spent on academic services and student facilities, as well as the number of good honours degrees achieved.
The Complete University Guide’s league table was announced on Monday, Week 4. Currently Lancaster are ranked 12th on the Times/Sunday Times list, 11th on the Guardian’s and even cracked the top ten of THE Student Experience Survey.
