Choosing a university is not just about the academic courses on offer. There are many factors to choosing the right university in the UK.

Location

We will give you a flavour of the different towns and cities in the UK to help you identify universities that might best suit you or your child. Some might wish to be near family members, live in a small town or a large city, be near the coast or near a major airport.

Whatever your preference, we can help with providing you information about where might be best location for you to study.

History

We will provide information such as how long each university has had university status, what is the background to the university and why was it set up because this can still influence the priorities the university has today. We will also provide information about the number of students and the international student numbers at the university.

Cost

Annual tuition fees for courses provided for international students at both undergraduate and post-graduate (taught) level can be reviewed and discussed.

Accommodation Location & Availability

We will review with you where the university accommodation is located on campus or spread across various locations and what is the transport like.

Having access to affordable university managed accommodation (called Halls of Residence) can be a very important factor in making sure you or your son/daughter settles well, especially, if this is the first time away from home.

We review accommodation options and highlight the cheapest self catering, single occupancy room rate for each university.

Facilities

There is a vast difference between the student facilities offered by different universities. For many parents and students this is an important factor, as sport or cultural amenities can matter a great deal depending on talents and interests.

Degree Focus

Both the history of a university and its research focus can give a good indication as to where the university’s ‘specialisms’ lie. To evaluate this, we refer to research data produced by the government – the Research Excellence Framework (REF). This detailed information looks at key subject areas of research and grades the quality of research in each subject area, by university. In our guides we highlight all subject areas where at least 60% of the research conducted in these specific fields have scored 3 or 4 stars. (4 stars being the highest ranking).

Ranking

In a highly competitive world, often the choice of university is as important as the course itself. We provide Times Higher Education & Shanghai Jaio Tong World University Ranking details (Top 400) plus we highlight Russell Group universities.

We also reference the results of the annual National Student Survey. This survey asks students, mainly in the last year of undergraduate degree study, 23 questions related to issues such as: overall student satisfaction, academic support and course teaching. Typically the survey is completed by over 250,000 students each year.

Online Courses

As the cost of university education can be high, we also focus on online courses that are available at each university. Online courses offer great flexibility as they can be studied part time and also they are much less expensive – and there are no accommodation costs associated with an online degree.

We also highlight online programmes offered by FutureLearn here. FutureLearn is the leading provider of online courses based in the UK, working with over 140 Universities worldwide. It is 50% owned by The Open University, which is the UK’s largest academic institution.