Cardiff University is the top higher education institution in Wales according to a guide published on Sunday.

The Sunday Times University Guide rankings place Cardiff first in Wales and 25th in the UK as a whole, up five places from its 2001 position in the league table.

Compilers attribute its rising fortunes to a broad range of subject strengths in both teaching and research and just a 6% student dropout rate, one of the lowest in Britain.

Only 6% of students drop out of Cardiff

The university has spent �160m in recent years on new buildings and refurbishing existing facilities.

In the research league tables, it is just outside the top 20 in the UK, and it has received 'excellent' ratings for more than half its teaching subjects from official assessors.

Welsh rankings

Five other University of Wales institutions come next in the Welsh rankings - Aberystwyth (39th in UK), Swansea (40), Bangor (47), Lampeter (55) and University of Wales Institute Cardiff (76).

The three other academic centres outside of the University of Wales family - University of Glamorgan (93), Swansea Institute of Higher Education (114) and North East Wales Institute (117) - are seventh, eighth and ninth in the list.

At the bottom of the Welsh table is the University of Wales College, Newport, which has dropped nine places in the UK rankings from 110th in 2001 to 119th this year.

Bangor received praise for a range of non-traditional course - ocean sciences and forestry were both rated excellent for teaching - and for developing new arts courses including film studies and creative writing.

Lampeter, the oldest degree-awarding institution outside Oxbridge in England and Wales, is one of the smallest universities in Europe with just 400 undergraduates admitted every year.

It received internationally excellent ratings for research in theology and English language and literature, and has also exceeded targets for social diversity and state school recruitment, which pushed it 13 places up the rankings in 2002.

National view

Nationally, there was no change at the top of the table, with last year's four frontrunners of Cambridge, Oxford, London School of Economics and Imperial College, London remaining the same.

But St Andrews in Scotland jumped 10 places to enter the top 10 at number six, after gaining outstanding teaching and research assessments in the past year.

The university gained a high profile after Prince William's decision to study there, which prompted a 44% rise in applications in 2001.

However, the rise in standards pre-dated the prince's arrival, according to university officials.

It also gained the title of University of the Year from the guide.

The league table of the UK's 123 universities is complied by using data from seven areas:

• teaching quality
• research quality
• A-level grades achieved by entrants
• degrees achieved
• staff to student ratios
• graduate employment
• dropout rates.