See the full rankings and subject tables for 2007, with option to search, sort and compare by different criteria

The next edition of The Times Good University Guide is still several weeks away, but that may be too late for those who are still sweating on places for this year. If your initial set of applications did not produce the desired result, now is the time to look for another course.

Until recently, a full set of rejections from your chosen universities led only to Clearing, the annual scramble at the end of August which matches applicants without offers to the remaining places. Nowadays, however, there is no need to wait until then. More than 47,000 places are available through the Extra service run by the Universities and Colleges Admission Service (Ucas).

Prospective students who are not holding any offers have until the end of June to make further applications – one at a time – until they secure another offer.

Nor are the options confined to the less prestigious universities, which tend to dominate clearing. Oxford and Cambridge may not be there but, if you have the right qualifications, you can try Edinburgh for geography or zoology, Imperial College London for computing or aerospace materials, or Warwick for film and literature.

Only a handful of universities do not have a course in Extra somewhere. If you are thinking of engineering, you can still take your pick of hundreds of courses at dozens of universities all over the UK.

The question that will occur to many applicants is whether the tables on this site are still a good indication of quality, or have things moved on since they were published? The main table in The Times Good University Guide has nine elements and only the indicator for research quality will be totally unchanged in June. (The research scores are derived from the official Research Assessment Exercise, which does not finish until December).

One of the strengths of the guide is consistency, however. The measures used in the tables and the weights attached to them do not change without reason and, consequently, there is less fluctuation than in some other publications. Universities do not change overnight and most of them will be in similar (but not identical) positions in the next edition.

Some movement is predictable because the measures in the table all come from published statistics. Universities have known for some time how they fared in the National Student Survey (NSS) and whether their undergraduates’ completion rate is up or down – and applicants who want to be ahead of the game can find this information online. The Higher Education Statistics Agency publishes most of the data used in the guide at www.hesa.ac.uk.

The main driver of change in this year’s tables will be the NSS, the annual student satisfaction poll carried out at every university in England, Wales and Northern Ireland – and at a growing number in Scotland, where the national body responsible for higher education opted out of the exercise. As one of the two weighted indicators (with research), student satisfaction will always have a big impact.

Many of the universities that did well in the NSS results published in 2006 again had high levels of satisfaction a year later. St Andrews University, for example, which jumped 13 places in The Times table last year after a stunningly successful NSS debut, produced equally good results the second time around. Again, many of the medium-sized campus universities proved particular popular with students – Loughborough, Lancaster and the University of East Anglia have never been out of the top 20 in the three years of the survey.

But some universities registered a big improvement in the latest survey, which should feed through into their league table position, as long as they have held their own in other areas. There was a rise of six percentage points in the proportion of students at Exeter University who were either satisfied or very satisfied overall, which will translate into a top-five place on this measure and should continue Exeter’s rise up the table.

Portsmouth is another university where satisfaction levels are up substantially, according to the latest NSS results. An increase of seven percentage points should see it in the top 20 on this measure, compared with fiftieth last year, and spark a rise up the overall table. At 79th place in the current ranking, Portsmouth is lower than it has been in most previous editions of the guide. With five universities all less than eight points ahead of it, in there is scope for the university to be closer to its accustomed position next time.

De Montfort University is another with much more satisfied students in the latest survey. A rise of ten percentage points was the biggest at any university and will take the Leicester-based institution well clear of the foot of the table on this measure, as well as helping it move up from 97th place overall.

Among those moving in the opposite direction may be Huddersfield University and the University of Wales, Newport, both of which dropped five percentage points on overall student satisfaction, and Leeds Metropolitan University, where the decline was four points. In a year when most students were marginally more satisfied with their universities, any decline is likely to be bad news for the league table position.

These and other universities may well compensate for their NSS disappointments with improvements in other areas - all three have reduced their drop-out rates in the past year, for example. How the various elements play out will be known in June, when the next edition of the guide is published.

The Times Good University Guide 2009 Buy the book

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