University of Warwick retains its position in the top 10 UK universities

The University of Warwick has retained its position as one of the top 10 universities in both The Guardian and The Times Higher Education rankings.

Warwick retained it’s ninth place in The Times Higher Education (THE) rankings, and also stayed at 77th place in the global rankings.

In The Guardian rankings, Warwick moved up by one place to eighth in the UK, overtaking Imperial College London.

The best performing subject area for Warwick was Business and Economics, where Warwick was placed at 26 across the world. Warwick also placed 51st for Arts and Humanities courses.

Oxford University dominated the THE national and world rankings, topping both for the second year in a row. Oxford also place first in the Guardian list, overtaking both Cambridge and St Andrews.

Cambridge University placed sixth in the world and second in the UK, as well as dropping to 3rd in The Guardian rankings.

Overall, UK universities have witnessed a slight decline in the past few years. In 2016, 34 UK universities were ranked in the top 200 global institutions, compared with 28 in the most recent rankings.

In the same period, Germany, Australia and China have all increased the number of universities in the top global 200. In 2016, just three German universities were ranked in the top 200, but has since increased to 23 in the most recent rankings.

The drop in global rankings for UK universities also correlates with a drop in funding when contrasted with non-UK universities. The average spending per academic at UK universities in the top 400 globally is £404,000, a 6.5% increase since 2016.

Over the same time period spending per academic in Germany increased by 38% to £942,000 and by over 57.1% in China to £1.14 Million.

Commenting on the poorer performance of UK universities in the global market, Director of the Centre for Global Education at Oxford University, Simon Marginson, said that there was a multitude of factors, including “modest national funding in research and development, weakened financial sustainability due to the pensions dispute, withdrawal of European funds and access to European research structure”.

Simon Marginson, attributed the history of strong global performance of the UK higher education sector to “a strong academic culture and entrepreneurial spirit”.

Dr Marginson did explain that there were several factors to the recent atrophy to UK universities’ global performance, including “strong policy pushback against global connections”, “loss of European structural funding” and “weakened financial sustainability due to the pensions dispute”.