High-fee UK universities fail to make grade

More than 20 universities planning to charge the maximum £9,000 fee for students next year have failed to make the top 200 of an influential international higher education league table.

The QS World University Rankings, published today, looked at how universities around the world had performed in six humanities subjects: English, geography, history, linguistics, modern languages and philosophy. Not one UK university apart from Oxford and Cambridge made the top 20 for English language and literature.

Twenty English universities failed to make the top 200 in any of the six subjects. They were Bath Spa, Birmingham City, Bournemouth, Brighton, Brunel, Coventry, De Montfort, East London, Kingston, Lincoln, Liverpool John Moores, London Met, Middlesex, Oxford Brookes, Plymouth, SOAS, Surrey, University of Central Lancashire, UWE Bristol and Westminster. University of Wales Newport and Glamorgan also failed to make the list in any of the topics.