QS World University Rankings 2027
British classrooms keep growing
And it could be impacting their universities' rankings.
By Nick Harland
18 June 2026
In brief
- UK universities embrace "classflation," expanding group sizes to plug growing financial holes in their balance sheets.
- There is correlation between class sizes, global rankings and student outcomes while faculty struggle under mounting administrative burdens.
- Institutions must find alternative revenue or face a widening quality gap between elite and non-elite universities.
For one lecturer , enough was enough. She was supposed to be in the golden years of her long academic career, when life should have been easy for her. But it was the opposite. "I'm inundated with admin," she said. “What’s the point?”
She quit and took early retirement instead.
This is an increasingly familiar story at UK universities, who are facing financial pressure from all angles. For many years, they balanced the books through elevated international student fees. But as international student numbers decline, their fees alone are not enough to plug the growing gaps in university balance sheets.
Instead, universities are admitting more students and creating bigger classes as a result. The situation is placing increasing pressure on faculty, cheapening the student experience and potentially impacting grades.
So-called ‘classflation’ is something that Byron Hyde is all too aware of. Having held teaching positions at several UK universities, he says he has noticed the trend first-hand. "I’ve experienced pretty large increases in class size – particularly in seminars and tutorials," he says.
According to Hyde, some high-ranking UK universities have tried to replicate the Oxbridge experience by introducing hyper-personal teaching in the form of one-on-one seminars. However, these universities "never really had the level of funding that Oxbridge had in order to have those one-on-one or two-on-one tutorials.” So over time, tutorials and seminars slowly got bigger.
Though class sizes had been slowly increasing for a number of years, events that happened during Covid meant the trend only accelerated.
"What universities do is hand out a load of offers – more than they're going to admit – assuming that a lot of people are not going to get their predicted grades. But there was a real problem during COVID in that A-Levels were cancelled,” Hyde explains. It meant students were awarded grades based on their predicted grades rather than their actual grades. “Because everybody got their predicted grade by default, they had to take too many students."
Hyde contends that these bigger class sizes remained even after COVID. In this sense, classflation appears similar to price inflation: it’s very easy for things to increase in price or size, but they often take a lot longer to come back down – if they do at all. "[Classflation] wasn't entirely an active decision on the part of the universities,” he says. “It also happened by accident as a result of COVID."
The pandemic meant that for some universities, the 2020 intake was their biggest ever. Consequently, Hyde says in one institution in which he taught, seminar sizes grew to more than 60 students, over triple what would be considered ideal. Its ranking also decreased during the same period.
Whilst ranking decline can’t be put down to bigger class sizes alone, it’s difficult to ignore. Bigger class sizes impact a school’s student to faculty ratio, which represents 10 percent of an institution’s total rank. It also has a knock-on effect on other parts of the student experience. Hyde points out that for something like essay writing, which tends to be a big challenge for young undergrads, large seminars make it more difficult to get personalised support from tutors.
“Students definitely learn more with smaller class sizes,” says Renita Coleman, a journalism and media lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin. “It's easier for teachers to see who is struggling or what they don't understand and correct that in small classes. Plus, students really step up when they feel that the professor cares about them. I think this is the biggest difference.”
Coleman says that when a class of hers increased in size from 18 to 20, she could feel the difference. “More students who needed help fell through the cracks. I was less likely to notice who needed help and wasn't asking for it.”
Research suggests that this can negatively impact student outcomes. For instance, one study from 2021 found that ‘larger classes are associated with significantly lower grades’, with a larger effect found in STEM subjects. Similarly, a 2024 study discovered that an increase in the number of students taking a course reduced average scores at one Norwegian university.
Yet classflation affects other aspects of university life as well. Hyde notes that most faculty at UK universities work on a so-called 10-40-50 contract, whereby their work is divided between 10 percent admin, 40 percent research and 50 percent teaching. But with bigger intakes requiring more teaching time, it is leaving people inundated with admin, unable to do enough research and disillusioned with academia.
Data from the 2027 QS World University Rankings suggests that classflation is a growing trend across UK universities. Among the top 20 UK institutions, 13 declined in the Faculty Student Ratio (FSR) indicator. And of the six that improved in this measure, some were only marginal: the FSR scores at Oxford and Cambridge remained the same, but rose slightly (by one and four places respectively) in the overall ranking.
Some UK institutions experienced big declines in their FSR scores for 2027. The University of Warwick fell 52 places in the FSR ranking, Glasgow fell 100, Bristol dropped 119 places, Sheffield fell 125 and Birmingham 126. All are leading Russell Group universities, and all placed in the global top 100.
It strongly contrasts with the UK’s top four universities in the ranking (Oxford, Cambridge, UCL and Imperial). All recorded FSR scores of at least 90 out of 100, yet the picture soon changes further down the ranking. The University of Edinburgh performs strongly with a score of 81.9, but the next top-ranked schools’ score fall rapidly: Manchester (61.3), Bristol (29), LSE (50.3), Warwick (43.1), Birmingham (39), Leeds (41), Glasgow (41.2), Sheffield (39.5), and Durham (29.5).
It suggests there may be a growing gap between the elites and non-elites of UK higher education, which is being exacerbated by difference in class sizes. Growing financial pressure on these universities means classflation is only likely to gather pace. Both Cardiff and East Anglia have said that further class size increases may be necessary. And in a statement sent to QS Insights, the University of Manchester’s Vice-President for Teaching, Learning & Students Jenn Hallam didn’t rule out similar measures being introduced.
“The university continually reviews class sizes to ensure students receive the highest quality learning experience and appropriate academic support,” the statement reads. “While there are no institution-wide plans to increase class sizes, some programmes with growing student demand may see changes to teaching group arrangements, balanced carefully with measures to maintain engagement, access to staff and the overall quality of the student experience.”
QS Insights contacted several other UK universities that declined in the FSR indicator, but none responded.
Hyde believes further increases to class size is bound to happen – although he’s keen to stress that any decisions will be driven by financial necessity.
"Vice Chancellors are almost always academics. They share the opinion of the academic body. They also don't want to increase class sizes. They know that it's not ideal and probably agree with the idea of classflation. It's not that they don't agree that it works – it's that they physically cannot afford [to not reduce class sizes]."
Hyde believes that faculty student ratios will keep getting worse “unless universities can find a way of getting some money from elsewhere”. For the country’s elite universities, that money tends to be readily available. For the rest, it is increasingly difficult to find.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Nick Harland is a freelance copywriter, writer and founder of Big Bang Copy. As a freelancer, he has written content for Specsavers, Numan, Ricoh, Hearst and many more. He specialises in education, healthcare and music, but has written about everything from financial services to luxury travel. In 2021, he founded the copywriting agency Big Bang Copy. He works with a small network of freelancers on bigger copywriting projects such as website rewrites or marketing campaigns.