St John’s College, Oxford, is the Best Oxbridge College

The universities of Oxford and Cambridge operate under a collegiate system, with students applying to a college of around 300 to 800 students rather than the university as a whole. The college you choose can have a huge impact on your university experience, both personal and academic, so it’s worth doing your research if you’re thinking of applying to Oxbridge.

This ranking assessed Oxbridge colleges across four key areas: financial assets, academic performance, lifestyle and accommodation. The individual areas are ranked on a scale of one to 10, and these are added together to achieve an overall score out of 40. It’s worth exploring the full results when deciding which college is the best fit for you.

Interestingly, different colleges came top for each of the ranking indicators. Trinity College Cambridge scored 10 for financial assets (the college owns more land than Queen Elizabeth II), while Oxford’s Merton College achieved a perfect score for academic performance.

Wadham College, Oxford, and Homerton College, Cambridge, scored full marks for Lifestyle and Accommodation respectively – but neither made it into the overall top 10.

Although St John’s didn’t come first in any of the four ranking indicators, it scored consistently highly across all areas and that’s why it’s ranked first overall. They score phenomenally well for financial assets, with net assets of £631.6 million and an endowment of £551.5 million – around £1 million of assets per student. The college is noted for its generosity, offering a huge range of scholarships, bursaries and grants.

Tom Ough, an alumnus of St John’s, told the Telegraph: “We had something like £250 a year to spend on books, we had travel grants and scholarships, and, if we fell on hard times, we could apply for emergency funding…fundamentally, St John’s generosity made my time at Oxford a whole lot easier. For others, it made their time at Oxford possible.”