Clearly a fair bit of what goes into these various rankings is subjective opinion, or is unrelated – maybe even inverse – to the actual intellectual rigour involved. Ratings that reflect how much the students are enjoying it could easily be a proxy for how cushy the place is.
More informative would be to know the average A-Level grades held by the entrants; the percentage of its graduates that is unemployed after a year; and the average graduate salary ten years on. Ideally you would have this sorted by degree subject and / or class.
Taken together, this tells you roughly how smart the cohort is to begin with but also what difference the university makes for them. Sure, you can argue that A-Levels don’t measure smarts, but that’s fine – if people with the best A-Levels aren’t very smart after all, the other two measurements will expose this.
One interesting thing that emerges from the above is that there are 5 times as many candidates with Oxbridge standard A-Levels as there are places there. There are 47,000 students at Oxbridge, so inferentially there are 190,000 elsewhere with much the same grades. As the average UK tertiary has 15,000 students enrolled, there are about 12 more whose students have Oxbridge grades. The first rank of UK universities therefore contains not two universities, but about 14.
The other thing that surprises is that notoriously “useless” courses like Media Studies have a very high employment rate. The money is not great, but neither is the money if you read English Literature at Oxford. Stats like this tell you whether the job and pay situation is poor because the course is worthless, or because its graduates are preening entitled delusional pseudo-intellectual left-wing gobs4ites who consider real work beneath them and are waiting for the right charity or quango post to come along.