Why you MUST choose carefully in Clearing... and how the Daily Mail guide can help

By ALASTAIR MCCALL - UNIVERSITY GUIDE EDTIOR Published: 18:00, 12 August 2026 | Updated: 18:23, 12 August 2026 With 80,000 university places up for grabs in Clearing today, students are in the driving seat as never before when it comes to choosing a university. A 3.6% year-on-year growth in the number of places available makes this a high-stakes day for prospective students and universities alike. Where Clearing was once considered to be the ‘last chance saloon’ for those at risk of missing out on university altogether, such is the choice now on offer that more than 23,000 applicants have waited until today to enter the race for a university place. Others will decline their original choice of university this morning after receiving better-than-expected results, preferring to take a chance on Clearing coming up with something better, with UCAS (the universities’ admissions service) anticipating increased switching – more commonly known as trading up. However you arrive at Clearing today, the Daily Mail Clearing Guide 2026 can help you find the place most suited to your needs with its new university and subject rankings based on data published in the past month, alongside detailed profiles of every institution. The need for sound advice has never been greater. Students signing up for university over the coming days will be the first to pay more than £30,000 for their degrees – and that's just the bill for tuition. Annual tuition fees for 2026-27 will be £9,790, with a baked-in rise to £10,050 already in place for 2027-28 and a further inflation-linked rise likely to be imposed for the final year of a typical three-year degree. With living costs on top of that, the average student in England is now graduating with more than £50,000 in loan debt. And then there is no guarantee of a job afterwards. The graduate jobs market is at its most tricky in a generation, having been rocked by a triple whammy of advances in artificial intelligence, a lack of economic confidence suffocating recruitment and an oversupply of graduates in certain subjects (despite continued shortages in others). Such is the choice now on offer through Clearing that over 23,000 applicants have waited until today to enter the race for a university place Such is the choice now on offer through Clearing that more than 23,000 applicants have waited until today to enter the race for a university place No wonder the question being asked in sixth forms and households up and down the country is whether the cost of university is even worth it. We believe that on balance it still is – as long as you choose carefully. This is a view shared by the government’s skills minister responsible for higher education, Jacqui Smith, who warned in June: ‘Going to university and getting a degree is one of the most transformational things a young person can do. But it is not a universal guarantee of success and not all degrees are equal.’ She was speaking after a report was published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) that showed the average graduate earned £100,000 more over their career than someone who did not go to university. But this sum varied greatly – from a £400,000 net gain for medics and economists to a small or even negative financial return for subjects such as performing arts and philosophy. Overall, the IFS said about a quarter of graduates could expect to be financially worse off over their lifetime as a result of going to university. Buyer beware. ‘As well as the variation by subject, too many franchised and poor-quality courses do not offer a good deal to young people – selling the dream, then leaving students in the lurch,’ Ms Smith said. ‘My message to those thinking about university [is] choose carefully. Don’t walk into a degree by default.’ Hardly a ringing endorsement of our present higher education system. This makes both the choice of university and the choice of course critical, because there are great universities and great courses to be found. Our ranking is the only one to include three graduate employment measures – covering the proportion of recent graduates gaining high-skilled jobs, the salaries that are being earned 15 months after leaving university, and graduates’ sense of their careers being on track. Skills minister responsible Jacqui Smith said in June: ‘My message to those thinking about university [is] choose carefully. Don’t walk into a degree by default’ Our unique University Finder allows you to create a league table based on the performance indicators that matter most to you. So, if you want a university table that looks at those three employment measures alone, you can zero the weightings on the nine other indicators that make up the Daily Mail university league table. Your newly personalised league table will feature some of the research-led Russell Group universities near the top, but also some lesser known names that our guide brings to the fore. Institutions such as Worcester, named as our 2027 University of the Year for Graduate Jobs. Here, 80% of graduates gain high-skilled jobs, ranking it 11th in the UK on this measure. Many of these jobs go to students on the university’s suite of healthcare courses and those on the teacher training programmes for which Worcester was first known. Cumbria, Derby, Robert Gordon (in Aberdeen) and Teesside join Worcester as modern universities that rank higher than 11 members of the Russell Group. So, don't just look at the big guns when it comes to choosing. Let our guide help you identify the universities where you stand the best chance of getting a good job afterwards. If you are set on trying to get into a Russell Group, there has never been a better moment. Once seldom seen in Clearing, several of the Russell Group of research-led universities are now active players in the post-results recruitment market. Many are expanding fast. A Daily Mail analysis of UCAS admissions data shows the number of undergraduates recruited jumped by 25% or more at six institutions between 2023 and 2025 – University College London (51%, although mostly overseas students), Durham (47% and overwhelmingly made up of UK students), York (33%), Liverpool (32%), Warwick (26%) and Leeds (25%). In all, the Russell Group recruited an extra 26,000 undergraduates in 2025 compared to two years before. So, there are more places at the top table than you might think, and accessible with lower grades than once was the case. And as a direct consequence of this aggressive recruitment strategy, which has seen 17 of the 24-strong group grow their undergraduate intake by at least 11.5% between 2023 and 2025, other universities which would have previously taken many of those students are scrambling to fill places, meaning there is a huge amount of choice on offer in return for even lower grades. Our Universities of the Year in 14 categories, led by Birmingham – the 2027 Daily Mail University of the Year – are a great place to start in your search for university excellence as well as being safe places in which to invest your student pound. Look also at our 79 subject tables spanning a wide range of the study options available to identify those that excel in the subject you are interested in. The table toppers are not always the usual suspects. See Cumbria for biomedical sciences, Birmingham City for music, and Robert Gordon for physiotherapy. Subject tables are ranked on student views (given by the 360,000 who took part in this year's National Student Survey) on teaching quality, student support and student experience; student success in the graduate jobs market measured by the proportion landing high-skilled jobs; and the proportion of graduates who believe their careers to be on track. Our institutional ranking is the broadest based UK university ranking, giving the most rounded view of excellence. In addition to the five measures used to rank subjects, it takes account of the median graduate salary earned by recent leavers, as well as research performance, research income, the proportion of students gaining firsts and 2:1 degrees, the number who drop out of their studies, the average entry qualifications achieved and the proportion of students whose parents did not go to university, as a measure of social inclusion. Read our rankings for every university HERE Alastair McCall is honorary professor of quantitative studies at the University of Buckingham and deputy director of its Centre for Education and Employment Research. He has been compiling and editing university guides since 1998.