The Google College Rankings

The approach used here at the Google College Rankings can produce a league table for universities in any country, not just the United States. To get a Google-ranking for universities in the United Kingdom, for example, just use a clean browser to search for the word university, but do it at google.co.uk rather than google.com. When the extraneous entries are removed from the results, this is the ranking that appears (as of today):

1. University of Cambridge
2. University of Oxford
3. University of Birmingham
4. University of Manchester
5. University of Leeds
6. Durham University
7. University of Edinburgh
8. University of Warwick
9. University College London
10. University of Southampton

This first ranking of the best British universities will form a basis for comparison and commentary in future posts.

Observers of British higher education—even remote observers—will be accustomed to seeing Oxford and Cambridge in the top two slots, as the oldest and most well-known universities in the United Kingdom. The rankings below them are likely to be much more fluid over time. Durham is often put in third place historically, after Oxford and Cambridge, but many of Great Britain’s other universities have become increasingly distinguished both within Britain and across Europe in the past few decades, and students attending them will be able to find much of value. What you get out of a university education always depends more on what you put into it than on some mystical “rank” that the institution may possess.