Inflation busters: Your Daft Uni Rankings Update

The stream of daft university rankings just keeps growing. It’s time for a new league table then of some of the daftest rankings around.

September 11, 2024

3–4 minutes

daft, Diversions, Ranking, Top 10

The Rankings Keep Coming

As is well known, the impact of inflation over time has reduced the real value of domestic fees universities and colleges in England charge. Unfortunately, inflation has not impacted in any meaningful way on the production of university league tables. There is still a ridiculous number of the things produced every year and the data that they use is growing to become more dubious than ever. We can all expect therefore the same decline in real terms value across the rankings domain where the seemingly endless and unstoppable production of university league tables continues.

Here’s a few recent league tables you might have missed then. From spooky campuses to food outlet proximity we really do have some spectacularly daft rankings for your delectation or avoidance as preferred. The all new top 10 follows.

The All New Top 10 Daft Uni Rankings

10 Campus Clocktowers

This ranking covers the delights of university clocktowers with all of their seemingly infinite variety of heights, styles, clock faces and chimes.

9 Best UK University Accommodation

An insightful league table this one from the Tab and the first one to deploy TikTok as a ranking tool. We will see more of this kind of daftness I am sure.

8 CEO Production

For this distinctive league table experts examined alumni pages on LinkedIn for each university to see how many graduates were listed as company founders, along with the number of founders that studied business, determining which university produces the most business owners.

Scrutinising LinkedIn pages always delivers the most reliable results. Truly entrepeneurial.

7 Northern UK University Ranking

A top 10 entry for Bantshire, this time a league table handily organising UK universities by their northernness. Unsurprisingly it is a good one for Scottish institutions

(Not to be mixed up with this earlier global ranking of universities very much from lower latitudes.)

6 University Motorway Service Stations

A definitive ranking of UK universities which also share a name with high quality motorway service stations.

5 College Free Speech Rankings

We used to have our own UK version of this with an entertaining traffic light system but this is a US ranking which must be the only league table which has Harvard in last place and where Harvard, Columbia, and NYU share an “abysmal” free speech status. Impressive.

4 Value For Money

Time Out carries a ranking from student review platform StudentCrowd has dug into more than 30,000 reviews across its website to help us all discover which UK university is the best value for money. It looked into feedback that had been posted between June 2022 and June 2024, taking note of which institutions received the most stars in the ‘value for money’ category. In an entertainingly opaque twist StudentCrowd doesn’t specify what constitutes value for money. Anyway, the winner is St Andrews with other Scottish universities showing well too.

3 The University Nando’s Ranking

Those extremely industrious scholars over at Bantshire have ranked all UK universities based on their distance to the nearest Nando’s, and given them a Nando’s Excellence Framework (NEF) score of Hot, Medium, or Mild. Tasty stuff, if completely daft.

2 Spookiest Unis

This ranking of the UK’s Spookiest University Towns is something special. With criteria including ghost sightings per 100k people and towns with the spookiest Google searches it really is pretty scary. And, of course, utter tosh.

1 UK University Logos

This is a magisterial and thoroughly rigorous assessment of 173 UK university and college logos. It’s genuinely authoritative and quite frankly just the daftest ranking out there. Utterly brilliant.

The Top 10 in full