Liverpool University on the up

LIVERPOOL has climbed 10 places in the trusted world university rankings published today by Times Higher Education.  

The city’s redbrick establishment came in at 171^st in the top 200, compared to last year’s ranking of 181. Still, Liverpool still has to catch up on its 2011 place when it stood at 165^th.

The eagerly-awaited rankings are the only global university performance tables to judge world class universities across all of their core missions - teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

The list uses 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons available, which are trusted by students, academics, university leaders, industry and governments.

Manchester University fell one place this year, but still managed to remain in the top 50 – coming in at 49^th place. Manchester was also one of the few provincial universities in the UK to make THES’s list of rankings by reputation, coming in at 47^th. Manchester has enjoyed a spectacular rise, shooting into the top 50 place last year from its 2011 ranking of 87^th.

Many of the other provincial universities in the UK are ahead of Liverpool in the main list, including Sheffield, Nottingham, Leeds and Lancaster.

As usual universities in the USA dominate the top 10, taking seven places. The other three are UK universities, Oxford in second place, Cambridge 7^th and Imperial in 8^th place. California Institute of Technology retains its spot at head of the rankings, having overtaken Harvard in 2011.