The University of London and the University of Wales are unusual in that their colleges/constituent institutions are treated as universities in their own right.
Undergraduate applications to UK state universities are managed by UCAS - the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service.
British universities tend to have a strong reputation internationally, although this is limited to a small amount of internationally known universities (principally Oxford and Cambridge). Within Britain a university's reputation is often proportional to its age. However this distinction is becoming blurred with the top red brick universities challenging Oxbridge, a development accelerated by the introduction (by newspapers) of league tables ranking university teaching and research in which Oxford and Cambridge are often matched or beaten by other universities. Despite this, there is still a clear two-tier system in operation, with less well-considered universities often struggling to attract able students, staff and funding. Many of the less highly regarded universities have had to expand into new areas (such as media studies and sports science) in order to compete.
Recent academic analysis of published statistics has pointed to there being 4 groupings of universities in terms of academic performance: the elites, the top old universities, the other old universities, and the new universities (ex-polytechnics and others that have achieved unversity status since 1992). The elite group consists of Oxford, Cambridge, UCL and Imperial. The other members of the Russel Group lie in the second tier of 22 universities, along with Bath, Durham, Leicester, Queen's University Belfast, St Andrews, UMIST and York.
However, if one this is to be learnt from recent statistics it is that comparisons in a single subject (which is what students are generally intersted in) often give quite different answers from overall comparisons. In the 2003
Times Good University Guide, 21 universities come top in at least one
subject area, 41 are in the top three in at least one subject area, and 80
are in the top ten in at least one subject area.
The most famous example of subject-specific ranking being dramatically different from the overall ranking is probably in history, where Oxford Brookes, the former polytechnic, gained a higher research rating that the elite Oxford University. Another example is in Civil Engineering, where Wales dominates the Times table - Cardiff and Swansea taking first and second - and neither Oxford nor
Cambridge make the top ten.
See Also:
Reputations