Lancaster's 8th ranking makes it a ‘winner’ in the 2011 Complete University Guide
Published 20 May 2010
Lancaster University has risen four places to be ranked eighth in the Independent Complete University Guide 2011, published on 20 May 2010. The Guide ranks Lancaster 8th nationally and number one in the North West in the regional rankings.
The top-ten position overall sees Lancaster in the same group as Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College. The Complete University Guide judges institutions on several measures: student satisfaction, research assessment, entry standards, degree results, completion rates, job prospects, student/staff ratio, spending on academic services such as libraries and spending on facilities such as careers and health services.
In the subject tables, Lancaster is ranked 6th for Accounting and Finance and 8th for Business Studies.
The Independent says Lancaster has risen in the league table because of an improvement in its student satisfaction score and because graduate prospects are better – shown in the numbers getting graduate jobs or undertaking further study six months after leaving university.
“Lancaster gives students contact with some of the best teaching staff in the UK,” says its vice-chancellor, Professor Paul Wellings. “We have a bustling and newly transformed campus, and students love the sense of community.”
The university has been working hard to improve the employability of its students, according to Professor Amanda Chetwynd, pro-vice-chancellor for colleges and the student experience. “We have put our Centre for Employment, Enterprise and Careers in our main square, right at the heart of the campus, which means it is in the students' minds,” she says. “As a result, students come in to it a lot more than they used to.”
Students are also being urged to start thinking very early in their degree courses about what they want to do when they graduate, and they are offered short periods of work experience over the summer or at Easter.
Other benchmarks of Lancaster’s rising world and UK rankings include:
- The Financial Times 2010 Top 100 Global MBA programmes ranked the Lancaster MBA 24th in the world
- The Guardian University Guide 2010 ranks Lancaster 12th for Business Studies and Economics, and first in the Northwest for these subjects.
- The Times Good University Guide 2011 ranked Lancaster University 10th nationally and first in the Northwest. Accounting and Finance was ranked 6th, Business Studies 8th and Economics 19th in the subject guides.
