Cambridge comes first in annual Complete University Guide rankings

The university beats Oxford to the top of the list for the third consecutive year

by Andrew Connell

This article is 12 years old

Monday April 29 2013, 11:52am

Cambridge has come top in the annual Complete University Guide list for 2014.

It is the third year in a row that Cambridge has beaten Oxford to the top spot, which dropped to third place last year, behind London School of Economics.

The list uses nine measures including academic services spend, entry standards, student satisfaction, staff-student ratios, research assessment and graduate prospects to determine the position of 124 British universities.

Cambridge managed to edge its way ahead of Oxford in all but two of the nine criteria - both the academic services spend, the amount spent on libraries and IT, and the percentage of graduates achieving a first or upper second class honours degree.

Subjects also received an individual ranking. Cambridge was top in 34 of the 46 subjects offered.

Besides Oxford and Cambridge, the top ten includes London School of Economics, Imperial College London, Durham, St Andrews, University College London, Warwick, Bath, and Exeter in tenth place.

Dr Bernard Kingston, principal author of the Complete University Guide, said it was "beyond dispute" that the table's top 10 "includes some of the world's finest higher education institutions".

Support Varsity

Varsity is the independent newspaper for the University of Cambridge, established in its current form in 1947. In order to maintain our editorial independence, our print newspaper and news website receives no funding from the University of Cambridge or its constituent Colleges.

We are therefore almost entirely reliant on advertising for funding and we expect to have a tough few months and years ahead.

In spite of this situation, we are going to look at inventive ways to look at serving our readership with digital content and of course in print too!

Therefore we are asking our readers, if they wish, to make a donation from as little as £1, to help with our running costs. Many thanks, we hope you can help!