Brains or beauty? Uni ranking dives

Warwick has fallen from 50th best university in the world to 58th, according to the 2012/13 league table compiled by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS).

After being on the periphery of the top 50 in 2011, the latest figures revealed by the QS place Warwick at 58, the same position they held in the QS rankings for 2009.

Amongst the faculty scores, as defined by QS, Social Sciences & Management remained 28th, whilst Natural Sciences were ranked 70th, up one point from last year.

However, Life Sciences & Medicine fell 17 points to 170th place and Engineering & Technology fell 15 points to 145th place. Arts & Humanities fell five places to 51st.

Euan Long, Third Year Engineering student, told the Boar: “Personally I can’t understand the drop. Even on a global scale dropping 15 places suggests that something is going wrong but engineering at Warwick hasn’t really changed over the past two years, if anything it’s improved.”

As part of the ‘Vision 2015’ project, which was published by the University in September 2007, Vice Chancellor Nigel Thrift stated he hoped that, “By 2015 Warwick will be in the top 50 world universities.

“As we approach Warwick’s 50th birthday in 2015, our challenge is plain: how to focus activity and drive so as to attain greater international pre-eminence. National pre-eminence is no longer enough.”

The University now has three years to regain its place in the worldwide top 50.

The top global institution was MIT in the USA. British universities amongst the top ten included Cambridge, UCL, Oxford and Imperial College ranked second, fourth, fifth and sixth respectively.

James Entwistle, the Students’ Union’s Education Officer, told the Boar: “It’s a bit of a shame to have dropped a few places, although there haven’t really been any drastic changes.”

“The heavy focus of the QS Rankings on peer reviews is possibly not the best method of rating universities and we hope that Warwick focuses on tackling the issues in teaching quality, which are highlighted as an area of excellence for Warwick, but still have some room for improvement.”

Commenting on the eight place drop, Peter Dunn, communications officer at Warwick, told the _Boar_: “The International tables vary widely. They also seem to undergo several significant changes and swings from year to year.”

This drop in the QS rankings is juxtaposed against a strengthened performance by Warwick in the UK rankings.

The university league table collated by the Guardian has seen Warwick rise from sixth to fifth for 2013, while The Complete University Guide sees Warwick rise from eighth to sixth.

Emphasising Warwick’s position as a leading university, Mr Dunn highlighted the University’s success in the UK tables.

“Interestingly all three [The Times’, The Sunday Times’ and the Guardian’s] consistently rank Warwick in the top 10 of their tables. While we can’t say that any individual position they assign Warwick in any one year must be true we do think that it is significant that all three place us consistently in the top 10, so we must be doing something right.”

In another table, Warwick was named amongst seventeen of the most beautiful universities in Britain.

According to The Telegraph, “The modernist design may not suit everyone, but Warwick University campus’s newest constructions such as the Zeeman Building thrive in their expansive green campus setting.”

Other universities cited include Cardiff, Edinburgh, Keele, Nottingham and Royal Holloway. The only other ‘plate-glass’ universities to feature with Warwick were Stirling and Sussex.