Mock TEF: the best UK universities for graduate jobs

If you want to know which UK universities give you the best chance of securing a professional job upon graduation, there are two ways to look at it.

In absolute terms, the prestigious Russell Group universities, which include University of Cambridge, are some of the best universities for graduate employment.

But when the data are benchmarked for contextual factors such as student demographics, entry qualifications and degree subjects studied at the university, it turns out that a very different group of universities is actually exceeding expectations when it comes to graduate employability.

This is according to Times Higher Education’s predictions for the UK government’s teaching excellence framework (TEF), a government initiative that is set to evaluate and monitor the quality of teaching at English universities. 

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More mock TEF predictions

Best UK universities for completion rates

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University of Sussex is also a standout performer for graduate destinations; not only is it second place for exceeding expectations, it also makes the top 5 positions using raw scores.

London universities are well-represented at the top of the table when sorted by the raw scores. But after benchmarking, many London institutions drop significantly down the ranks, indicating that graduate success in the city could be at least partly due to factors not directly related to the universities’ own efforts.

In fact, the Midlands of England is a good bet for study destinations, since its universities – including University of Birmingham – generally score highly for graduate employment.

Graduate employment is evaluated by a marker that measures the proportion of university leavers who go into "professional-level" jobs or postgraduate study, benchmarked by subject mix, students' entry qualifications, age, ethnicity and gender. The full methodology is available here.

Mock TEF: UK universities ranked by graduate destinations

Sorted by benchmarked scores