By Miles Gilroy, Senior Print Editor
After placing 55th in 2024 and 54th in 2025, The University of Bristol has once again risen in the rankings, now sitting at 51st in the QS World University Rankings 2026.
Now placed between Yonsei University in Seoul (50th) and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (52nd), The University of Bristol has gained 11 places since 2022.
The QS rankings considers 'over 1,500 of the world's top universities [...] with over 100 locations represented around the world.' This means The University of Bristol has placed in the top 4 per cent and, with 90 domestic universities making the list, the UK inhabits 6 per cent of the entire rankings, with Imperial College London, The University of Oxford, and The University of Cambridge taking our top three places.
The Times Higher Education (THE) rankings for 2026 have not yet been released, but The University of Bristol has not come higher than 76th place (2023/2018) since 2017. So, why is our placing the QS rankings so much higher?
Harry Mayes
The QS rankings are based on five main lenses: research and discovery (50 per cent), employability and outcomes (20 per cent), learning experience (10 per cent), global engagement (15 per cent), and sustainability (5 per cent). THE uses very similar lenses, but makes no consideration for employability or sustainability.
This suggests that The University of Bristol scores very highly in these areas. And it does. With an employer reputation score of 89.4/100 and a near perfect 97/100 for sustainability (12th globally in 2025), it stands to reason that these metrics could carry us up the rankings.
Sofia Webster
The QS rankings also assigns nearly twice as much weight to academic/research reputation than THE, implying that The University of Bristol's general reputation is a powerful asset for the institution. Scores of 87.3 in academic reputation and 89.4 in employer reputation prove this to be very much true.
The university's diversity is another factor that likely puts us higher in the rankings, considering QS assigns global engagement double the 7.5 per cent weighting that THE does. The QS global engagement indicator is measured using four metrics: international student ratio, international research network, international faculty ratio, and international student diversity. In all four of these categories, we scored over 90, with our highest being international student diversity at 96/100.
In fact, global engagement was our second highest scoring lens, behind sustainability. Research and discovery came in third, employability fourth, and learning experience was our weakest area. However, learning experience being a weak area isn't as bad as it sounds. QS calculates learning experience entirely on the faculty-student ration, i.e. the number of staff members for each student, stating 'The more academic staff resources are made available to students, for teaching, supervision, curriculum development, and pastoral support, the better the learning experience should be.' With a score of 36.7 in this category, The University of Bristol has more than one faculty staff member for every three students. Compared to other universities, this isn't that bad, with 17th place, The University of California, Berkeley (UCB), scoring only 29.4.
Featured image: University of Bristol
