Admission

Undergraduate admission statistics
	2023^[120]	2022^[121]	2021^[122]	2020^[123]	2019^[124]
Applications	23,211	23,819	24,338	23,414	23,020
Offer Rate (%)	16.0	15.3	14.6	16.8	16.9
Enrolments	3,219	3,271	3,298	3,695	3,280
Yield (%)	86.5	89.7	92.8	94.0	84.3
Applicant/Enrolled Ratio	7.21	7.28	7.38	6.34	7.02
Average Entry Tariff^[125]	—	—	205	201	200

More information Domicile and Ethnicity, Total ...

HESA Student Body Composition (2022)
Domicile^[126] and Ethnicity^[127]	Total
British White	50%	50
British Ethnic Minorities^{[lower-alpha 1]}	16%	16
International EU	9%	9
International Non-EU	25%	25
Undergraduate Widening Participation Indicators^[128]^[129]
Female	54%	54
Private Schools	31%	31
Low Participation Areas^{[lower-alpha 2]}	6%	6

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In common with most British universities, prospective undergraduate students apply through the UCAS application system, but prospective applicants for the University of Oxford, along with those for medicine, dentistry, and University of Cambridge applicants, must observe an earlier deadline of 15 October.^[132] The Sutton Trust maintains that Oxford University and Cambridge University recruit undergraduates disproportionately from 8 schools which accounted for 1,310 Oxbridge places during three years, contrasted with 1,220 from 2,900 other schools.^[133]

To allow a more personalised judgement of students, who might otherwise apply for both, undergraduate applicants are not permitted to apply to both Oxford and Cambridge in the same year. The only exceptions are applicants for organ scholarships^[134] and those applying to read for a second undergraduate degree.^[135] Oxford has the lowest offer rate of all Russell Group universities.^[136]

Most applicants choose to apply to one of the individual colleges. For undergraduates, these colleges work with each other to ensure that the best students gain a place somewhere at the university regardless of their college preferences. For postgraduates, all applicants who receive an offer from the university are guaranteed a college place, even if they do not receive a place at their chosen college.^[137]

Undergraduate shortlisting is based on achieved and predicted exam results, school references, and, in some subjects, written admission tests or candidate-submitted written work. Approximately 60% of applicants are shortlisted, although this varies by subject. If a large number of shortlisted applicants for a subject choose one college, then students who named that college may be reallocated randomly to under-subscribed colleges for the subject. The colleges then invite shortlisted candidates for interview, where they are provided with food and accommodation for around three days in December. Most undergraduate applicants will be individually interviewed by academics at more than one college. In 2020 interviews were moved online,^[138] and they will remain online until at least 2027.^[139]

Undergraduate offers are sent out in early January, with each offer usually being from a specific college. One in four successful candidates receives an offer from a college that they did not apply to. Some courses may make "open offers" to some candidates, who are not assigned to a particular college until A Level results day in August.^[140]^[141]

The university has come under criticism for the number of students it accepts from private schools;^[142] for instance, Laura Spence's rejection from the university in 2000 led to widespread debate.^[143] In 2016, the University of Oxford gave 59% of offers to UK students to students from state schools, while about 93% of all UK pupils and 86% of post-16 UK pupils are educated in state schools.^[144]^[145]^[146] However, 64% of UK applicants were from state schools and the university notes that state school students apply disproportionately to oversubscribed subjects.^[147] The proportion of students coming from state schools has been increasing. From 2015 to 2019, the state proportion of total UK students admitted each year was: 55.6%, 58.0%, 58.2%, 60.5% and 62.3%.^[148] Oxford University spends over £6 million per year on outreach programs to encourage applicants from underrepresented demographics.^[144]

In 2018 the university's annual admissions report revealed that eight of Oxford's colleges had accepted fewer than three black applicants in the past three years.^[149] Labour MP David Lammy said, "This is social apartheid and it is utterly unrepresentative of life in modern Britain."^[150] In 2020, Oxford had increased its proportion of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) students to record levels.^[151]^[152] The number of BAME undergraduates accepted to the university in 2020 rose to 684 students, or 23.6% of the UK intake, up from 558 or 22% in 2019; the number of Black students was 106 (3.7% of the intake), up from 80 students (3.2%).^[152]^[153] UCAS data also showed that Oxford is more likely than comparable institutions to make offers to ethnic minority and socially disadvantaged pupils.^[151]

Teaching and degrees

Undergraduate teaching is centred on the tutorial, where 1–4 students spend an hour with an academic discussing their week's work, usually an essay (humanities, most social sciences, some mathematical, physical, and life sciences) or problem sheet (most mathematical, physical, and life sciences, and some social sciences). The university itself is responsible for conducting examinations and conferring degrees. Undergraduate teaching takes place during three eight-week academic terms: Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity.^[154] (These are officially known as 'Full Term': 'Term' is a lengthier period with little practical significance.) Internally, the weeks in a term begin on Sundays, and are referred to numerically, with the initial week known as "first week", the last as "eighth week" and with the numbering extended to refer to weeks before and after term (for example "noughth week" precedes term).^[155] Undergraduates must be in residence from Thursday of 0th week. These teaching terms are shorter than those of most other British universities,^[156] and their total duration amounts to less than half the year. However, undergraduates are also expected to do some academic work during the three holidays (known as the Christmas, Easter, and Long Vacations).

Scholarships and financial support

There are many opportunities for students at Oxford to receive financial help during their studies. The Oxford Opportunity Bursaries, introduced in 2006, are university-wide means-based bursaries available to any British undergraduate, with a total possible grant of £10,235 over a 3-year degree. In addition, individual colleges also offer bursaries and funds to help their students. For graduate study, there are many scholarships attached to the university, available to students from all sorts of backgrounds, from Rhodes Scholarships to the relatively new Weidenfeld Scholarships.^[157] Oxford also offers the Clarendon Scholarship which is open to graduate applicants of all nationalities.^[158] The Clarendon Scholarship is principally funded by Oxford University Press in association with colleges and other partnership awards.^[159]^[160] In 2016, Oxford University announced that it is to run its first free online economics course as part of a "massive open online course" (Mooc) scheme, in partnership with a US online university network.^[161] The course available is called 'From Poverty to Prosperity: Understanding Economic Development'.

Students successful in early examinations are rewarded by their colleges with scholarships and exhibitions, normally the result of a long-standing endowment, although since the introduction of tuition fees the amounts of money available are purely nominal. Scholars, and exhibitioners in some colleges, are entitled to wear a more voluminous undergraduate gown; "commoners" (originally those who had to pay for their "commons", or food and lodging) are restricted to a short, sleeveless garment. The term "scholar" in relation to Oxford therefore has a specific meaning as well as the more general meaning of someone of outstanding academic ability. In previous times, there were "noblemen commoners" and "gentlemen commoners", but these ranks were abolished in the 19th century. "Closed" scholarships, available only to candidates who fitted specific conditions such as coming from specific schools, were abolished in the 1970s and 1980s.^[162]

Libraries

The university maintains the largest university library system in the UK,^[21] and, with over 11 million volumes housed on 120 miles (190 km) of shelving, the Bodleian group is the second-largest library in the UK, after the British Library. The Bodleian is a legal deposit library, which means that it is entitled to request a free copy of every book published in the UK. As such, its collection is growing at a rate of over three miles (five kilometres) of shelving every year.^[163]

The buildings referred to as the university's main research library, The Bodleian, consist of the original Bodleian Library in the Old Schools Quadrangle, founded by Sir Thomas Bodley in 1598 and opened in 1602,^[164] the Radcliffe Camera, the Clarendon Building, and the Weston Library. A tunnel underneath Broad Street connects these buildings, with the Gladstone Link, which opened to readers in 2011, connecting the Old Bodleian and Radcliffe Camera.

The Bodleian Libraries group was formed in 2000, bringing the Bodleian Library and some of the subject libraries together.^[165] It now comprises 28^[166] libraries, a number of which have been created by bringing previously separate collections together, including the Sackler Library, Law Library, Social Science Library and Radcliffe Science Library.^[165] Another major product of this collaboration has been a joint integrated library system, OLIS (Oxford Libraries Information System),^[167] and its public interface, SOLO (Search Oxford Libraries Online), which provides an electronic catalogue covering all member libraries, as well as the libraries of individual colleges and other faculty libraries, which are not members of the group but do share cataloguing information.^[168]

A new book depository opened in South Marston, Swindon, in October 2010,^[169] and recent building projects include the remodelling of the New Bodleian building, which was renamed the Weston Library when it reopened in 2015.^[170]^[171] The renovation is designed to better showcase the library's various treasures (which include a Shakespeare First Folio and a Gutenberg Bible) as well as temporary exhibitions.

The Bodleian engaged in a mass-digitisation project with Google in 2004.^[172]^[173] Notable electronic resources hosted by the Bodleian Group include the Electronic Enlightenment Project, which was awarded the 2010 Digital Prize by the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.^[174]

Museums

Oxford maintains a number of museums and galleries, open for free to the public. The Ashmolean Museum, founded in 1683, is the oldest museum in the UK, and the oldest university museum in the world.^[175] It holds significant collections of art and archaeology, including works by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Turner, and Picasso, as well as treasures such as the Scorpion Macehead, the Parian Marble and the Alfred Jewel. It also contains "The Messiah", a pristine Stradivarius violin, regarded by some as one of the finest examples in existence.^[176]

The University Museum of Natural History holds the university's zoological, entomological and geological specimens. It is housed in a large neo-Gothic building on Parks Road, in the university's Science Area.^[177]^[178] Among its collection are the skeletons of a Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, and the most complete remains of a dodo found anywhere in the world. It also hosts the Simonyi Professorship of the Public Understanding of Science, currently held by Marcus du Sautoy.^[179]

Adjoining the Museum of Natural History is the Pitt Rivers Museum, founded in 1884, which displays the university's archaeological and anthropological collections, currently holding over 500,000 items. It recently built a new research annexe; its staff have been involved with the teaching of anthropology at Oxford since its foundation, when as part of his donation General Augustus Pitt Rivers stipulated that the university establish a lectureship in anthropology.^[180]

The Museum of the History of Science is housed on Broad Street in the world's oldest-surviving purpose-built museum building.^[181] It contains 15,000 artefacts, from antiquity to the 20th century, representing almost all aspects of the history of science. In the Faculty of Music on St Aldate's is the Bate Collection of Musical Instruments, a collection mostly of instruments from Western classical music, from the medieval period onwards. Christ Church Picture Gallery holds a large collection of old master paintings and drawings.^[182]

Publishing

The Oxford University Press is the world's second oldest and currently the largest university press by the number of publications.^[183] More than 6,000 new books are published annually,^[184] including many reference, professional, and academic works (such as the Oxford English Dictionary, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, the Oxford World's Classics, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and the Concise Dictionary of National Biography).

Reputation and ranking

Quick Facts National rankings, Complete (2025) ...

Rankings
National rankings
Complete (2025)^[185]	2
Guardian (2025)^[186]	1
Times / Sunday Times (2025)^[187]	3
Global rankings
ARWU (2024)^[188]	6
QS (2025)^[189]	3
THE (2024)^[190]	1

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Due to its age^[191]^[192] and its social and academic status,^[193]^[194] the University of Oxford is considered to be one of Britain's most prestigious or elite universities^[195]^[196] and to form, along with the University of Cambridge, a top two that stand above other UK universities in this regard.^[191]^[193]^[194]^[197]

Oxford is regularly ranked within the top five universities in the world in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings,^[198]^[199] as well as the Forbes's World University Rankings.^[200] It held the number one position in the Times Good University Guide for eleven consecutive years,^[201] and the medical school has also maintained first place in the "Clinical, Pre-Clinical & Health" table of the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings for the past seven consecutive years.^[202] In 2021, it ranked sixth among the universities around the world by SCImago Institutions Rankings.^[203] The THE has also recognised Oxford as one of the world's "six super brands" on its World Reputation Rankings, along with Berkeley, Cambridge, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.^[204] The university is fourth worldwide on the US News ranking.^[205] Its Saïd Business School came 13th in the world in Financial Times Global MBA Ranking.^[206]

Oxford was ranked 13th in the world in 2022 by the Nature Index, which measures the largest contributors to papers published in 82 leading journals.^[207]^[208] It is ranked fifth best university worldwide and first in Britain for forming CEOs according to the Professional Ranking World Universities,^[209] and first in the UK for the quality of its graduates as chosen by the recruiters of the UK's major companies.^[210]

In the 2018 Complete University Guide, all 38 subjects offered by Oxford rank within the top 10 nationally meaning Oxford was one of only two multi-faculty universities (along with Cambridge) in the UK to have 100% of their subjects in the top 10.^[211] Computer Science, Medicine, Philosophy, Politics and Psychology were ranked first in the UK by the guide.^[212]

According to the QS World University Rankings by Subject, the University of Oxford also ranks as number one in the world for four Humanities disciplines: English Language and Literature, Modern Languages, Geography, and History. It also ranks second globally for Anthropology, Archaeology, Law, Medicine, Politics & International Studies, and Psychology.^[213]