The Guardian league table claims to rate Universities by student satisfaction. It gives higher scores to “value added”, overall satisfaction and feedback (the latter two by results from the National Student Survey), money spent per student, entry grades, careers prospects and staff-student ratio, than other ratings such as research quality which other newspapers (and Universities themselves) like to emphasize. It does this because, as it says in yesterday’s article supporting the release of its 2011 league tables “Oxford tops Guardian’s 2011 university league table“
The tables provide vital information for the more than 600,000 university applicants who this year [because of HE budget cuts] face the toughest ever competition for places.
Swansea University is in the uncomfortable position of being 93 of 117 institutions, above only Glyndwr and Newport in Wales (Swansea Metropolitan is not listed), and well below the institutions we strive to compete against for research rankings.
