Step aside Oxbridge, because the UK has a new top university. According to the Daily Mail, the country’s biggest brainiacs are all going to want to get their degrees at Imperial College London, as the paper has just crowned it Britain’s best university.
The Mail took it upon itself to rank every single uni in the UK from best to worst to publish ‘The Mail University Guide rankings for 2025’, and Imperial came out on top for the second year in a row. The STEM uni based in South Kensington ranked highly for its research quality, high-skilled jobs and graduate salaries but fell short when it came to student experience (ranked 57th), student satisfaction (ranked 121st) and first-gen student intake (122nd).
Of course, Oxford and Cambridge universities didn’t follow far behind, coming in second and third place respectively. London institutions LSE and University College London also made it into the top five, giving Londoners one more thing to be smug about.
Imperial College also came in first place in the prestigious QS World University Rankings 2025, so it must be doing something right.
You can see the full list of the Daily Mail’s 10 best and worst unis in the UK here.
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Wrapping your head around all the different university rankings can be quite a challenge. On a different leaderboard, LSE was named the top university in London. Meanwhile, votes from actual students on StudentCrowd placed the Royal Veterinary College in first place.
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