What Is the Easiest Russell Group to Get Into?

What Is the Easiest Russell Group to Get Into?

Membership of the Russell Group is considered a hallmark of academic excellence. Its universities include some of the most prestigious in the UK (and, indeed, the world), such as Oxford, Cambridge and the rest of the G5 group (LSE, Imperial, and UCL).

If you want to get into many of these universities, the process is incredibly competitive. But what are the hardest and easiest Russell Groups to get into? In this guide, we will explore this question by looking at the Russell Group acceptance rates and offer rates. Then we will consider the entrance standards of these institutions and arrive at a final assessment.

Before we get going, remember – this is all relative. Every Russell Group university is ranked in the top 10% in the world (QS World University Rankings) and you will need to be an excellent applicant to be made an offer by any of them.

If you’d like to see the Russell Group unis ranked and find out which are the ‘best’ (according to the league tables), take a look at our in-depth guide on the subject.

Russell Group Acceptance Rates vs Offer Rates

Before we take a look at the acceptance rates of the Russell Group universities, we should clarify a key distinction: between acceptance rates and offer rates.

Colloquially, when many students refer to acceptance rates, they mean the percentage of students who apply to a university which the university accepts. However, universities themselves use the term acceptance rate to mean a subtly – but vitally – different thing!

For the rest of this guide, we’ll use the terms below:

Offer rate: the percentage of students who apply to a university who are offered a place

Acceptance rate: the percentage of students who apply to a university who then go on to take up a place at it

As we’ll see, Russell Group acceptance rates are lower – sometimes much lower – than offer rates because not all students who are offered a place will accept it. This is usually for one of two reasons:

1. A student who is offered a place chooses not to accept it – normally because they want to accept an offer from another university
2. A student who is offered a place misses their conditions (e.g. through underperforming in their A Level) and therefore cannot take up the place

The more relevant statistic when evaluating which are the hardest and easiest Russell Group universities to get into is their offer rate, not their acceptance rate. This is because the offer rate represents the difficulty of receiving an offer from the university. A university might have a low acceptance rate but this can be artificial – e.g. it could be dragged down if the university is not most students’ first choice.

Russell Group Universities’ Acceptance Rates

The table below represents the offer and acceptance rates for Russell Group universities.

Note: not all Russell Group institutions publish their admissions statistics. You might see a range of acceptance rates quoted for these universities elsewhere online, but we don’t consider these to be reliable and have decided not to include them here. The universities without published acceptance rates (and therefore not included in the table below) are:

• Cardiff
• Exeter
• Liverpool
• Queen Mary
• Queen’s, Belfast
• Southampton
• Birmingham
• York

Also note the year column in the table – some universities, notably Manchester and Nottingham, revealed their offer and acceptance rates in response to Freedom of Information requests several years ago, but do not publish them regularly, so these figures are a little out of date.

From this we can see that most Russell Groups have an acceptance rate between 10% and 17%. The exceptions are LSE and UCL on the lower end (below 10%) and Nottingham and Newcastle on the higher end (around 20%).

As we noted above, though, the better measure of the difficulty of gaining admission is the offer rate. For that reason, we’ve ordered the table by offer rate from lowest to highest.

Oxford, LSE, and Cambridge have the lowest offer rates of all the Russell Group universities. Oxford and LSE are the lowest, at around 16%, with Cambridge a notch higher at 21%. Rounding out the top five are UCL and Imperial. These are the collectively known as the G5 universities, and are usually ranked as the five best Russell Group universities.

Of the Russell Groups which publish admissions data, Sheffield, Nottingham, and Durham have the highest offer rates – all 70% plus. Newcastle and Warwick are the other two Russell Group universities known to have an offer rate of higher than 60%.

It is perhaps surprising to see that Durham is included at this end of the table, as it is generally considered to be academically competitive and is one of the higher-ranking Russell Group universities.

So, can we consider these five to be the easiest Russell Groups to get into? Not quite – there may be an even better way to assess the difficulty of getting into a university, which we’ll discuss now…

Russell Group Entrance Standards

What’s wrong with just using offer rate to tell how hard it is to get into a university?

Put simply, not all universities are assessing candidates of the same level of academic ability. A university may have a high offer rate because the quality of applications it receives is, on average, very high (excellent A Level grades, personal statements, and admissions test scores etc.). That wouldn’t make it easy to get into – a student submitting a weaker application would still be rejected.

Luckily, we can get an indication of the academic ability of successful applicants to all the Russell Group universities. In their rankings of UK universities, the Guardian and the Complete University Guide both report data on the entrance standards of admitted students. This is calculated as their average UCAS tariff score (i.e. the grades they receive at A Level or equivalent). This will give us a good idea of the quality of application you need to submit in order to be successful at these universities.

The table below presents the entrance standards for all 24 Russell Groups, as reported by both the CUG and the Guardian. We’ve then averaged out the rankings to produce an ‘overall rank’.

As we can see, this presents quite a different picture. Two of the Russell Group universities with the highest offer rates, Durham and Warwick, are in the top 10 for entrance standards. This suggests that part of the reason they have high offer rates is because they receive a high quality of applications on average.

Perhaps surprisingly, it is not Oxbridge or another G5 university but Glasgow which comes out on top by this metric. This may be because Glasgow admits a higher number of Scottish students, and UCAS scores Scottish Highers (the equivalent of A Levels sat by Scottish students) slightly higher than A Levels in its tariff points system. Even so, this suggests you need to have an excellent academic record to get into Glasgow.

The next hardest Russell Groups to get into by entrance standards are Cambridge, Imperial, and Oxford. Edinburgh, UCL and LSE also feature high on the list.

The easiest Russell Groups to get into by this measure are Nottingham, Cardiff, Newcastle, QMUL and Liverpool. Newcastle and Nottingham are also among those with the highest offer rates.

Top 5 Easiest Russell Groups to Get Into

Now we’ve explored the data from a few different angles, it’s time to give our verdict. What are the easiest Russell Groups to get into?

We’ll give one final caveat – all these metrics take into account the average student across all courses. The difficulty of gaining entry to any university varies significantly by subject and is affected by other factors – some admissions teams weight predicted grades highly, while others focus more on the personal statement or admissions test performance. Each of these might play more or less to your personal strengths. Depending on all these factors, any given individual might be better equipped to get into one university which is ‘harder’ on average than another, ‘easier’, one.

That said, it is still useful to have a broad overview, provided you know to take it with a pinch of salt!

Liverpool

Offer rate: Unknown

Acceptance rate: Unknown

Entrance standards: 24^th highest / 24

Liverpool does not publish admissions data, but its entrance standards are judged to be the lowest in the Russell Group. It therefore makes our list of the easiest Russell Groups to get into.

Queen Mary, University of London

Offer rate: Unknown

Acceptance rate: Unknown

Entrance standards: 23^rd highest / 24

Queen Mary was founded as a medical school and still specialises in that area. This perhaps explains why, on average, it is comparatively easy to get into compared to other Russell Group universities – while still being a good university, it has less of a reputation in other subject areas and is therefore less exacting in its entrance standards.

Nottingham

Offer rate: 74.0% (15^th lowest / 16 published)

Acceptance rate: Unknown

Entrance standards: 20^th highest / 24

Nottingham has one of the highest known offer rates in the Russell Group and its entrance standards are comparatively modest, meaning it can be considered one of the easier Russell Group universities to get into.

Newcastle

Offer rate: 68.2% (13^th lowest / 16 published)

Acceptance rate: 19.8%

Entrance standards: 22^nd  highest / 24

Like Nottingham, Newcastle has a fairly high offer rate and its entrance standards are among the lowest in the Russell Group.

Cardiff

Offer rate: unknown

Acceptance rate: unknown

Entrance standards: 21^st highest / 24

Cardiff does not publish admissions data but its entrance standards are considered among the lowest in the Russell Group.

Top 5 Hardest Russell Groups to Get Into

Now we’ve looked at the ‘easiest’, let’s examine the hardest Russell Groups to get into. Remember, the same caveats we mentioned above also apply here.

Cambridge

Offer rate: 21.2% (3^rd lowest / 16 published)

Acceptance rate: 16.6%

Entrance standards: 2^nd highest / 24

There is no doubt that Cambridge is one of the hardest Russell Group universities to get into. Although its offer rate is a notch higher than Oxford’s, its entrance standards are higher. In reality, these two highly competitive universities are practically inseparable in terms of the difficulty of gaining entry.

You can read more about the offer and acceptance rates for Cambridge in our guide.

Oxford

Offer rate: 16.0% (1^st lowest  / 16 published)

Acceptance rate: 13.9%

Entrance standards: 4^th highest / 24

Oxford has the lowest offer rate of any Russell Group university and the fourth highest entry standards. It deserves to be considered one of the hardest Russell Groups to get a place.

Find out more about the offer and acceptance rates for Oxford.

LSE

Offer rate: 16.3% (2^nd lowest  / 16 published)

Acceptance rate: 6.5%

Entrance standards: 6^th highest / 24

LSE has the lowest acceptance rate of any Russell Group university and the second lowest offer rate. Its entrance standards are the sixth highest of the Russell Group members.

Read more about the offer and acceptance rates for LSE here.

Imperial

Offer rate: 25.9% (5^th lowest  / 16 published)

Acceptance rate: 10.2%

Entrance standards: 3^rd highest / 24

Imperial is a highly demanding university with a rigorous application process. It has the fifth lowest offer rate in the Russell Group the third highest entry standards.

Learn more about the offer and acceptance rates for Imperial in our guide.

UCL

Offer rate: 24.9% (4^th lowest  / 16 published)

Acceptance rate: 8.9%

Entrance standards: 8^th highest / 24

The final entry in our list of the hardest Russell Groups to get into is UCL. It has a lower offer rate than Imperial (fourth overall in the Russell Group) and the eighth highest entry standards.

You can read more about the offer and acceptance rates for UCL here.

Conclusion: Easiest Russell Group to Get Into

While all Russell Group universities are academically rigorous and globally respected, some are relatively more accessible than others. Based on offer rates and entrance standards, universities such as Liverpool, Queen Mary (QMUL), Nottingham, Newcastle, and Cardiff emerge as the easiest Russell Groups to get into. These institutions tend to have either higher offer rates or lower entrance standards – or both.

However, it’s important to remember that “easiest” is a relative term. Gaining a place at any Russell Group university still requires strong academic performance and a compelling application. And since admissions vary by course, the competitiveness of your chosen subject will matter more than statistics which average out the university as a whole.

If you’re aiming for a Russell Group university, your best strategy is to apply where your strengths align with the course requirements – not just where the numbers seem most favourable.