KING’S has fallen from 27th to 29th in the Sunday Times UK university ranking released yesterday evening.
The College has fallen for the fourth year in a row in the ranking, seeing its position decrease from 10th in 2011 to an all-time low of 29th this year.
The Sunday Times ranked KCL 106th out of 123 universities in the country for student satisfaction by using data from the National Student Survey (NSS), but did not rank the university outside of the top 25 for any other ranking component.
King’s has now dropped in all three of the major domestic rankings for 2015, falling from 19th to 28th in the Complete University Guide and from 32nd to 40th in the Guardian.
Student satisfaction crisis
A King’s spokesperson told Roar they took all university rankings “seriously”, adding: “We know that UK and international league tables are regularly used by students, their parents and their advisers to help them gain an impression of a university.
“However they are only once source of information and they take different approaches when compiling data.”
On comparing international and domestic rankings they said it was “difficult to make direct comparisons”.
Earlier in the year Roar reported on the student satisfaction crisis at the College, which seems to be the reason for this year’s poor domestic performance.
Other than student satisfaction, other ranking metrics included graduate prospects, firsts/2:1s awarded and student/staff ratio where King’s came 12th, 11th and 4th in the country respectively.
The poor student satisfaction performance is mirrored in other rankings, with the Complete University Guide putting KCL 111th out of 123 UK universities. And whilst adopting a different weighting, the Guardian put King’s at 85th in the country for course satisfaction.
29th in the country, 16th in the world
The poor domestic performance stands in stark contrast with a positive performance for King’s in the international rankings.
Only last week QS ranked KCL as the 16th best university in the world for the 2015 academic year, whilst Times Higher Education and the Shanghai ranking have the university at 38th and 67th respectively.
The reason for this disparity is due to differences in methodology between domestic and international rankings.
Whilst domestic rankings favour a heavy weighting of student satisfaction, international rankings focus more on perceived academic reputation and the number of international staff and students.
With all the domestic rankings for 2015 now published, the Times Higher Education international ranking is due to be published on the 1st of October, with the Shanghai ranking set to follow.
Health education vice president at KCLSU, Sophia Koumi told Roar: “For KCLSU, the satisfaction of students is central.
“Last year KCLSU put a huge amount of time into understanding why health students particularly feel less satisfied.”
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