<p>The QS World University Rankings measure institutional performance through a weighted mix of indicators — academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty-to-student ratio, research citations, international faculty and student ratios, international research networks, employment outcomes and sustainability. Between the 2021 and 2025 cycles, several UK universities outside London and the South East recorded upward trajectories. Data from the Home Office show that the UK issued over 486,000 sponsored study visas in 2023, a surge that accompanied strategic investments by universities in the Midlands and the North. This article examines five of those institutions — Leeds, Newcastle, Birmingham, Durham and Liverpool — and the underlying metrics that propelled their rank climbs.</p> <h2 id="the-regional-context">The Regional Context</h2> <p>Universities UK has documented a sustained shift in research funding and student recruitment towards northern and midland cities, driven partly by the government’s Northern Powerhouse agenda and the West Midlands Combined Authority’s skills strategy. UCAS data for the 2024 undergraduate cycle showed a 12 percent increase in international applications to universities in Yorkshire and the North East compared with the 2020 cycle. The Quality Assurance Agency’s review of transnational education partnerships noted that institutions outside the Golden Triangle were expanding their global footprint, building joint institutes and dual-degree pipelines in China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. HESA finance records confirm that total research income across Russell Group members in the North and Midlands rose by an average of 18 percent in real terms from 2019/20 to 2022/23.</p> <h2 id="university-of-leeds">University of Leeds</h2> <h3 id="qs-rank-trajectory">QS rank trajectory</h3> <p>Leeds climbed from 91st in the 2021 QS ranking to 75th in the 2025 edition, an advance of 16 places across the five-year window. The institution first entered the global top 100 in 2023 and has since consolidated its position.</p> <h3 id="driver-metric-employer-reputation">Driver metric: employer reputation</h3> <p>QS data indicates that Leeds improved its employer reputation score by approximately 9 points between 2021 and 2025. The university’s careers service, ranked among the largest of any UK higher education provider outside London, placed more than 4,000 students in year-long industrial placements in 2022/23. Employer partnerships with firms in manufacturing, finance and digital sectors, many concentrated in the Leeds City Region, lifted graduate employment outcomes scores after QS expanded the employability weighting.</p> <h3 id="research-funding">Research funding</h3> <p>HESA finance returns show that Leeds’s research grant and contract income grew from £158 million in 2019/20 to £181 million in 2022/23. The university’s health and data-science clusters — particularly the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics and the NIHR Clinical Research Facility — attracted competitive UKRI and Horizon Europe awards. Forty-three percent of Leeds’s 2023 research output was published in the top 10 percent of journals by citation impact, according to SciVal data released by the university.</p> <h3 id="international-faculty">International faculty</h3> <p>The proportion of international academic staff rose from 30 percent in 2020 to 35 percent in 2024, based on HESA staff records. The university’s “Global Recruitment” framework introduced 20 new early-career fellowship lines targeted at non-UK candidates across five strategic research themes.</p> <h2 id="newcastle-university">Newcastle University</h2> <h3 id="qs-rank-trajectory-1">QS rank trajectory</h3> <p>Newcastle moved from 146th in 2021 to a joint 110th position in 2025, a gain of 36 ranks. The climb represents the largest five-year improvement among Russell Group universities located north of the Midlands during this period.</p> <h3 id="driver-metric-citations-per-paper">Driver metric: citations per paper</h3> <p>The university’s normalised citation impact score, as extracted from QS indicator data, advanced by roughly 20 percentage points. Newcastle’s strengths in ageing, mitochondrial biology and coastal engineering produced a cluster of highly cited papers. Clarivate’s 2024 Highly Cited Researchers list included seven Newcastle academics, up from three in 2020, with four of those in clinical medicine.</p> <h3 id="research-funding-1">Research funding</h3> <p>HESA data record an increase in Newcastle’s research income from £119 million in 2019/20 to £146 million in 2022/23. The National Innovation Centre for Ageing and the National Innovation Centre for Data, both co-funded with UK and devolved-government grants, catalysed new industry-facing contracts. Pharma and biotech firms provided 26 percent of the university’s contract research income in 2023.</p> <h3 id="international-faculty-1">International faculty</h3> <p>International academic staff accounted for 31 percent of Newcastle’s total in 2024, against 26 percent in 2020. The Faculty of Medical Sciences hired 14 tenure-track principal investigators from outside the UK in the 2022 and 2023 academic years, concentrated in genomics and neuroscience.</p> <h3 id="employer-reputation">Employer reputation</h3> <p>The employer reputation score rose by more than 10 points over five years. Newcastle’s Careers Service runs one of the UK’s largest SME internship schemes, with 650 local and regional businesses offering positions in 2023. The university ranked 11th among UK institutions on the graduate employment outcome indicator in the 2025 QS edition.</p> <h2 id="university-of-birmingham">University of Birmingham</h2> <h3 id="qs-rank-trajectory-2">QS rank trajectory</h3> <p>Birmingham advanced from 87th in 2021 to 80th in 2025, a seven-place gain. It re-entered the top 80 in 2024 after fluctuating between 87 and 91 earlier in the decade.</p> <h3 id="driver-metric-international-research-network">Driver metric: international research network</h3> <p>QS introduced the international research network indicator in 2023, and Birmingham consistently scored above 80 on a 100-point scale. The university co-authored papers with 2,300 institutional partners across 150 countries in the three years to 2023, according to Scopus data published in its annual review. Partnerships with Sun Yat-sen University, the Indian Institute of Science and the University of São Paulo generated high-volume, sustained co-publication output.</p> <h3 id="research-funding-2">Research funding</h3> <p>Birmingham’s research grants and contracts income rose from £183 million in 2019/20 to £209 million in 2022/23, HESA figures show. The Birmingham Health Partners alliance and the Institute for Global Innovation drove successful UKRI strategic funding bids. The university served as lead partner on 12 European Research Council grants active in 2024, the highest number among Midlands institutions.</p> <h3 id="international-student-and-faculty-balance">International student and faculty balance</h3> <p>The share of international students among the total student body increased from 32 percent in 2020 to 38 percent in 2024, while international academic staff held steady at about 34 percent. Birmingham’s overseas campuses — notably the Dubai campus opened in 2018 — created a reciprocal flow of faculty and graduate researchers between the UK, UAE and China.</p> <h2 id="durham-university">Durham University</h2> <h3 id="qs-rank-trajectory-3">QS rank trajectory</h3> <p>Durham rose from 86th in 2021 to 78th in 2024 and held 78th in the 2025 edition, a net gain of eight positions. The university recovered strongly from a dip to 92nd in 2023, which was partly attributable to COVID-19 disruptions to research output.</p> <h3 id="driver-metric-academic-reputation">Driver metric: academic reputation</h3> <p>Durham’s academic reputation score increased by approximately 4 points after the 2023 trough. The university’s humanities and social-science departments — ranked in the global top 30 by QS subject tables for theology, archaeology and geography — drove reputation surveys among scholars. The Institute for Advanced Study launched interdisciplinary clusters that attracted visiting fellows from Princeton, Yale and the Max Planck Society.</p> <h3 id="research-funding-3">Research funding</h3> <p>HESA data record a rise from £68 million in 2019/20 to £82 million in 2022/23. The university’s research strategy prioritised sustainability and energy transition topics, securing a £15 million UKRI grant for the Durham Energy Institute. Durham also reported a 31 percent increase in Horizon Europe win rate between 2021 and 2023 against the UK sector baseline.</p> <h3 id="international-faculty-2">International faculty</h3> <p>The proportion of international academic staff reached 42 percent in 2024, up from 38 percent in 2020. The university’s collegiate system enabled 17 colleges to recruit international early-career researchers as teaching fellows, reinforcing the global character of the academic community.</p> <h2 id="university-of-liverpool">University of Liverpool</h2> <h3 id="qs-rank-trajectory-4">QS rank trajectory</h3> <p>Liverpool moved from 181st in 2021 to 176th in 2025, a gain of five places. While the shift is smaller than that of the other institutions examined, the improvement coincided with a strong post-pandemic recovery in postgraduate research enrolments.</p> <h3 id="driver-metric-employer-reputation-1">Driver metric: employer reputation</h3> <p>Employer reputation scores advanced by roughly 6 points over five years. Liverpool’s graduate employment rate in health and life sciences exceeded 96 percent within six months of graduation across the 2021–2023 cohorts, according to the university’s DLHE and Graduate Outcomes survey submissions. The Royal Liverpool University Hospital, the Materials Innovation Factory and a cluster of vaccine-research spin-outs created a dense recruitment pipeline.</p> <h3 id="research-funding-4">Research funding</h3> <p>Liverpool’s research income grew from £93 million to £107 million between 2019/20 and 2022/23, HESA data show. The Centre of Excellence in Infectious Diseases Research and the pandemic-response work at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine attracted emergency funding streams that continued into long-term infrastructure grants.</p> <h3 id="international-faculty-3">International faculty</h3> <p>International academic staff increased from 24 percent to 28 percent of the total. The Faculty of Health and Life Sciences ran targeted recruitment campaigns in India and Sub-Saharan Africa, filling critical research positions in immunology and pharmacology after 2021.</p> <h3 id="student-and-visa-landscape">Student and visa landscape</h3> <p>UKVI data indicate that the North West consistently accounted for about 11 percent of all UK study-visa grants between 2021 and 2023. Liverpool’s international student body expanded accordingly, with non-UK students reaching 36 percent of total enrolments in 2023/24.</p> <h2 id="common-threads">Common Threads</h2> <p>Five trends recur across these institutions. First, employer reputation scores advanced at every university examined, reflecting tighter integration between careers services, placements and regional economic clusters. Second, international faculty recruitment drove gains on the international-faculty ratio and helped raise research output to globally competitive levels. Third, research income rose faster than the UK sector average; HESA sector-level data show a median real-terms increase of 15 percent among Russell Group members outside the South East from 2019/20 to 2022/23, and each of the five exceeded that figure. Fourth, international student demand — tracked by UCAS applications and Home Office visa issuances — supplied the diversity metrics required by the QS methodology. Fifth, all five universities expanded or deepened transnational research partnerships, benefiting the international research network indicator after its introduction in 2023.</p> <p>The data align with a Universities UK report published in 2023, which found that mid-tier research universities in cities with affordable operating costs and devolved industrial strategies were gaining relative ground in global league tables. QAA assessments of these institutions also recorded enhancements in the stewardship of academic standards and the expansion of collaborative provision with overseas partners.</p> <p>Applicants from China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East constituted the largest international student cohorts at the five universities in 2023/24, according to HESA enrolment records. Leeds, for example, enrolled over 5,000 Chinese students across all levels of study, while Newcastle and Birmingham each enrolled more than 3,500. Liverpool’s partnership with Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University provided a unique Sino-British articulation route that boosted both its international student numbers and its transnational research output.</p> <h2 id="faq">FAQ</h2> <p><strong>1. Does a rise in QS rank mean teaching quality has improved at these universities?</strong> Not directly. QS rankings incorporate metrics that are influenced by teaching quality, such as employer reputation and employment outcomes, but they primarily measure research output, academic opinion and global engagement. The Teaching Excellence Framework maintained by the Office for Students is the UK’s dedicated mechanism for evaluating teaching quality.</p> <p><strong>2. How should international applicants use these case studies when shortlisting universities?</strong> The case studies highlight which aspects of university performance are improving. An applicant focused on employability may prioritise institutions with fast-rising employer reputation scores. A PhD aspirant might weight research funding growth more heavily. Comparing QS indicator-level data — rather than just the overall rank — gives a more operational view.</p> <p><strong>3. Will the universities continue to climb?</strong> Sustaining the trajectory depends on continued investment in research, successful international recruitment in a period of policy uncertainty around student visas, and steady academic reputation gains. Universities with diversified funding and strong regional industrial partnerships are positioned more resiliently, but external shocks — such as changes to UK immigration rules — can affect international-student metrics.</p> <p><strong>4. Are there unranked institutions in the Midlands and North that might follow a similar path?</strong> Several post-1992 universities in the region have recorded improvements on specific QS indicators, particularly employer reputation and international student ratios, without yet moving into the top 500. The University of Hull and Nottingham Trent University are examples that have shown incremental gains, though they remain outside the top-tier bracket.</p> <p><strong>5. How do the international-faculty ratios compare with peer institutions in the United States or Australia?</strong> Selective US public universities and members of Australia’s Group of Eight often report international-faculty shares in the range of 30 to 45 percent. The five UK institutions discussed fall within or above that band, with Durham and Birmingham at the upper end. Cross-border hiring of early-career researchers has been the primary driver of growth.</p>