There is a great deal of data available that can help you and your son or daughter in making choices about universities.
The Higher Education Statistical Authority collects data from every university, including data about the variety of subjects and courses. The National Union of Students also publishes data annually, including the National Student Survey.
Most of the ‘quality’ newspapers publish their own University Guides, based on this data, in some cases adding their own rankings and data.
One of the most comprehensive, in terms of access to information, is the Guardian Newspaper University Guide.
The Guardian provides “46 interactive subject tables online for nearly 150 universities and colleges in the UK. Readers can create their own tables by ranking the institutions according to, say, career prospects, or staffing ratios.”
They go on to say: “You will also find online a comprehensive A-Z guide to what campuses have to offer. If you’d prefer a small (or huge) institution, or one near the beach, or a place with tip-top sporting facilities, our guide can help.”
The Guardian has rated departments against the following criteria:
- Teaching quality, as rated by final-year students in the National Student Survey (NSS): percentage of students satisfied.
- Feedback and assessment, as rated by final-year students in the NSS: percentage of students satisfied.
- NSS results when final-year students were asked about the overall quality of their course.
- Spending per student: given as a banded score out of 10.
- Staff-student ratio: number of students per member of teaching staff.
- Career prospects: proportion of graduates who find graduate-level employment, or study full-time, within six months of graduation.
- Value added: comparing students’ individual degree results with their entry qualifications – given as a banded score out of 10. This helps to show the effectiveness of teaching at an institution – the extent to which a department helps students to exceed expectation.
- Entry qualifications (Ucas tariff score).
It is very easy to sort this data to see which university does best under the different headings. In this short video we show you how.
There is also a separate guide for smaller, specialist institutions including music and art, profiles of universities, and profiles of subjects.
And should you want the full dataset, it is available as a Google spreadsheet. If you click on ‘file’, and then ‘save as’, you can download a copy to your computer as, for instance, an xls file. For the graphically ambitious, you can then make your own charts visualising the data!
Another good website for accessing data about universities and courses is Unistats.
Unistats, run by direct.gov, describes itself as “the official website to help you make an informed choice when deciding which UK university or college to apply to”, and it offers an easy search engine for finding data and information. Click here to use the search engine.
We would recommend you set up an account to allow you to save data searches. You can watch the video below which shows how to make quick searchers on Unistats and the kind of data you can find.
Unistats provides more data than the Guardian University Guide, but perhaps requires more effort to make sense of the data. It also provides data on every university (Swansea Metropolitan, Wolverhampton and Liverpool Hope did not allow the Guardian to use their data) and on further education colleges offering higher education courses, although in some cases there is insufficient data to display.
Unistats provides an excellent and comprehensive Frequently Asked Questions page.
This should be enough for most of you, but if you are used to using statistics and want to find out more, the unistats data page allows you to download the full data as xls files for every college and course. This provides very detailed data but requires some expertise in interpretation. There is as guide to help in this process.
Accessing and even interpreting data are only parts of the process. There is a lot of very detailed data available. But you and your son or daughter have to decide what is important for you.
Are you looking at full-time or part-time courses? Is the quality of the teaching your main concern? Are you more interested in the location of the university and the social facilities available? Are you concerned mostly about post-course employment possibilities? Do you want to know the ratio of teachers to students? Working out these questions can help you decide what you are looking for when accessing and interpreting data.
And remember that although summary data, such as university league tables, may be the most easy to understand, more detailed course data can vary greatly by subject, even in the same institution.