Ranked: These are the unis making billions of pounds a year

Oxford and Cambridge are making over £2 billion pounds a year, new stats show. I repeat, TWO BILLION.

Figures released by HESA comparing the income of UK universities in 2019/20 show Oxford and Cambridge topping yet another league table.

With both making over £2 billion in the 2019/20 academic year, it was a long way down to the rest of the country’s unis.

Claiming third spot is UCL, with an impressive income of £1.5 billion. Edinburgh and Manchester also nagged a spot into the top five – all raking in over £1 billion a year.

The top 20 unis with the biggest incomes:

Oxford uni stands apart from all the others in that it received over £160m in income from donations and endowments. The closest uni after this was Cambridge – £85m – followed by Edinburgh, which raked in only £37m in donations.

Oxford also managed to get £100m in investment income – nearly 500% more than Cambridge who got the second highest amount.

UCL was the top of the pile when it came to making money from tuition fees, with around a third of its income falling under the “tuition fees and education contracts” category.

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