About

en.campusclash.lol is a campus league in which 160 UK universities compete in a single live table. Voting is free and needs no account. The "Campus Sponsor" slot on each campus card is the one thing that is sold, and it changes hands by auction.

This is not an academic ranking

A position here measures nothing about teaching quality, research output or graduate outcomes. It shows how many people voted for that campus and nothing else. A campus near the top has a large, noisy student community — that is the whole claim.

Where the data comes from

The list is built from the official registers of all four UK nations: the Office for Students Register for England, the Universities Scotland membership list, the GOV.UK list of recognised bodies in Wales, and the Department for Education's list of funded higher education institutions in Northern Ireland.

An institution appears here if it holds degree awarding powers and either carries university title or holds research degree awarding powers. The second condition is what keeps the University of London colleges — King's, QMUL, UCL, SOAS, Birkbeck, Goldsmiths and the LSE — in the table despite not holding a university title of their own. The first condition is what keeps out trading names that merely sound like universities.

Names, founding years and coordinates come from Wikidata, matched on the official website domain. A few founding years that the sources disagree on are flagged in the data rather than guessed at.

Districts and regions

The map and the "city" on each card are both the same thing: an ONS local authority district, derived from the campus postcode through the ONS postcode directory. That is the unit official boundaries actually draw, which is the only kind a map can colour in honestly.

It has one consequence worth knowing about: a campus is filed under the district its postcode falls in, not the town people say it is in. The University of Reading shows up in Wokingham, and UWE in South Gloucestershire. Both are correct, and both are surprising. The region filter uses the twelve ITL1 regions — the nine English regions plus Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

How the table is worked out

Votes are held in distributed counters rather than one, so thousands arriving at the same moment do not queue behind each other. The counters are totalled every minute and the table is rebuilt from that. Ties are broken alphabetically.

Get in touch

For a data correction, a removal request or sponsorship: hello@tryq.io