These are the Russell Group unis that grad schemes will be most impressed by, in 2024

Showing them this in my next interview x


Another set of uni rankings has just been released and this time it’s the QS World University Rankings 2025. This year’s ranking looks at over 1,500 universities across 105 higher education systems to tell us the very best universities on the planet.

But you might not care about things like research quality and actually just care about whether the uni you go to will help you get a job when you graduate.

Well, included in the rankings is an employer reputation score which ranks each university on how well they are respected by grad employers and employers more broadly. Each university is given a score from one to 100 on this.

At the bottom, it’s not good news for York grads as York has the lowest employer reputation score of all the Russell Groups. At 30.1 out of 100, it is ranked 313th in the world for how impressed employers are with a York degree. This is closely followed by Queen’s University Belfast with 33.6 and Queen Mary University of London at 36.9.

But even though they were beaten by Imperial College London in the overall rankings, Oxford and Cambridge are naturally topping the ranking for employer reputation with perfect scores of 100.

So these are the Russell Group unis, ranked by how impressed grad schemes will be with a degree from them:

23. University of York – 30.1

22. Queen’s University Belfast – 33.6

21. Queen Mary University of London – 36.9

20. University of Liverpool – 39.4

19. Cardiff University – 43.2

18. University of Southampton – 44.3

17. University of Exeter – 45

16. University of Sheffield – 48.7

15. Newcastle University – 59.3

14. University of Nottingham – 65.8

13. University of Glasgow – 67.7

12. University of Birmingham – 69

11. University of Leeds – 75.9

10. University of Bristol – 82.5

9. Durham University – 83.9

8. King’s College London – 85.7

7. University of Warwick – 86.4

6. London School of Economics – 97

5. University of Edinburgh – 97.2

4. University of Manchester – 98.1

3. University College London – 98.3

2. Imperial College London – 99.5

1. University of Oxford – 100

=1. University of Cambridge – 100

More on: Oxbridge Russell Group students