- By Viggo Stacey, International Education & Policy Writer at QS Quacquarelli Symonds.
As UK education minister Bridget Phillipson has rightly acknowledged, the UK is home to many world-class universities.
And the country’s excellence in higher education is yet again on display in the QS World University Rankings 2026.
Imperial College London, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge and UCL all maintain their places in the global top 10 and 17 of the total 90 UK universities ranked this year are in the top 100, two more than last year.
The University of Sheffield and The University of Nottingham have returned to the global top 100 for the first time since 2023 and 2024 respectively.
But despite improvements at the top end of the QS ranking, some 61% of ranked UK universities have dropped this year.
Overall, the 2026 ranking paints a picture of heightening global competition. A number of markets have been emerging as higher education hubs in recent decades – and the increased investment, attention and ambition in various places is apparent in this year’s iteration.
Saudi Arabia – whose government had set a target to have five institutions in the top 200 by 2030 – has seen its first entry into to top 100, with King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals soaring 34 places to rank 67th globally.
Vietnam, a country that is aiming for five of its universities to feature in the top 500 by the end of the decade, has seen its representation in the rankings leap from six last year to 10 in 2026.
China is still the third most represented location in the world in the QS World University Rankings with 72 institutions, behind only the US with 192 and the UK with 90. And yet, close to 80 institutions that are part of the Chinese Double First Class Universities initiative to build world-class universities still do not feature in the overall WUR.
Saudi Arabia currently has three institutions in the top 200, while Vietnam has one in the top 500. If these countries succeed in their ambitions, which universities will lose out among the globe’s top in five years’ time?
The financial pressure the UK higher education is facing is well documented. Universities UK (UUK) recently calculated that government policy decisions will result in a £1.4 billion reduction in funding to higher education providers in England in 2025/26. The Office for Students’s warning that 43% of England’s higher education institutions will be in deficit this academic year is often cited.
Some 19% UK university leaders say they have cut back on investment in research given the current financial climate, and an additional 79% are considering future reductions.
On a global scale, cuts like this will more than likely have a detrimental impact on the UK’s performance in the QS World University Ranking – the world’s most-consulted international university ranking and leading higher education benchmarking tool.
The 2026 QS World University Rankings already identify areas where UK universities are behind global competitors.
With a 39.2 average score in the Citations per Faculty area, measuring the intensity of research at universities, the UK is already far behind places such as Singapore, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia and Mainland China, all of which have average scores of at least 70.
In Faculty Student Ratio, analysing the number of lecturers compared to students, the UK (average score of 26.7) is behind the best performing locations such as Norway (73.7), Switzerland (63.8) and Sweden (61.8).
While Oxford, Cambridge and LSE all feature in the global top 15 in Employment Outcomes and 13 UK universities feature in the top 100 for reputation among employers, other universities across the world are improving at a faster rate than many UK universities.
And, despite its historical dominance in the global education lens, global competitors are catching up with UK higher education in international student ratio and international faculty.
While 74% of UK universities improved in the international student ratio indicator in 2022, the last few years have identified a weakening among UK institutions. In 2023, 54% of UK universities fell in this area, in 2024, 56% dropped and in 2025, 74% declined. And in 2026, 73% dropped.
The government in Westminster is already aware that every £1 it spends on R&D delivers £7 of economic benefits in the long term and, for that reason, it prioritised spending to rise to £22.6bn in 2029-30 from £20.4bn in 2025-26.
But without the financial stability at higher education institutions in question, universities will need more support going ahead beyond support for their research capabilities. Their role in developing graduates with the skills to propel the UK forward is being overlooked. The QS 2026 World University Ranking is already showing that global peers are forging ahead. UK universities will need the right backing to maintain their world-leading position.
How many of the universities in the top 100 have any sort of commercial relationship with QS? How many in the top 500? What proportion of QS’s university customers are in the ranking compared with those who are not?
If this were peer-reviewed academic research, this kind of transparency would be a basic expectation.
I’ve never seen so much short-sightedness concentrated in one place.
You had a country that dominated the academic world for decades. That country undertook a radical shift in university funding. It moved from a mostly publicly funded system to one where the financial risk was dumped onto students. It devalued the academic profession, shrank relative salaries, and chipped away at academic freedom. The payoff? A relentless, 25-year slide down every serious university ranking.
That country is the United States—check the numbers.
And against this clear example, we have policymakers in the UK still plowing ahead with a short-sighted focus, armed with a brave, ill-informed, long-stupided, and blindly ideological conception of sustainability. Sustainability does not mean merely balancing budgets. Saving that leads to worse outcomes is not sustainability; it is a downward spiral into mediocrity.
Please, get informed. Look at the facts. Check the assumptions behind the models you’re using. The homo economicus—a perfectly rational, well-behaved economic actor—is a theoretical construct. It doesn’t exist. Aim to be a homo sapiens.
Don’t bet the UK higher education system on a model that has never delivered a single success. Remember, America became the academic powerhouse of the last 75 years on the shoulders of public investment and the influx of immigrant scientists fleeing Europe in the early 20th century. Don’t believe me? Look at the data. Check where the great American scientists of the 20th century were born and trained.