Queen's University Belfast sits towards bottom of Russell Group in new league table

The table has been produced by the London-based company QS Quacquarelli Symonds Limited, which describes itself as a firm of “global higher education experts” that ranks more than 1,500 universities worldwide annually.

In terms of outright global ranking, the 2027 league table puts Queen’s at 174th in the world, compared to 199th the previous year.

That makes Queen’s 26th overall in the UK, and 23rd out of the 24 universities in the Russell Group - the collective of the UK’s best universities to which Queen’s has belonged since 2006.

Among the Russell Group’s members are Oxford University, Cambridge University, Imperial College London, and the London School of Economics (though some other prominent high-performing universities, such as St Andrew’s and Bath, are not members).

Last year, Queen’s was bottom of the overall Russell Group QS rankings; this year, it is just above Cardiff University.

Beneath that overall ranking, QS also rates universities in a series of discrete categories.

In some of these, QUB’s performance was mid-table.

In citations per faculty, for example, QUB came out 24th in the UK and 14th in the Russell Group.

In terms of the proportion of faculty who are international (with a higher proportion deemed desirable) QUB was ranked sixth in the UK and fourth in the Russell Group, and for international students (again, a higher proportion is seen as good) it was 17th in the UK and sixth in the Russell Group.

For international research network (this being “a measure of an institution's success in creating and sustaining research partnerships with institutions in other locations”), QUB was 18th in the UK and Russell Group both.

But in the remaining categories QUB was among the lowest performers in the Russell Group, if not the lowest.

Under the category “employer reputation” it came 25th in the UK and 22nd in the Russell Group (QS generates this number by a survey measuring “the reputation of institutions and their programmes in the eyes of fellow academics and those involved in hiring graduates”).

In terms of “academic reputation” (which is based on a similar survey) it was 25th in the UK and was bottom of the Russell Group 24.

And in the category “employment outcomes” it came in 53rd in the UK and last in the Russell Group (this is described as a measure of “to what degree institutions can ensure a high level of employability for their graduates, and their record in producing graduates that have gone on to make a meaningful impact on society”).

In faculty-to-student ratio, QUB was 31st in the UK and 23rd out of 24 in the Russell Group.

Queen’s was approached for comment, but did not provide any.

It recently announced that it had been named ‘University of the Year’ in the Whatuni Student Choice Awards, based on reviews left by 4,012 students.