A UK degree is narrow on purpose
This is the part that surprises students from systems with a broad first year. A UK bachelor's degree specialises from week one. There is no general education requirement to hide behind and very little room to switch subject after the first year without losing time. Whatever you pick, you are doing it — most days, for three years.
Which means the course content is not a detail to be settled after the university. It is the decision, and the university is the setting you make it in.
Two courses with the same name are not the same course
Computer science at one university can be theoretical, mathematics-heavy and assessed by examination; at another it can be project-led, built around industry-designed modules and assessed by portfolio. Both are computer science. One of them suits you considerably better than the other, and the only way to find out which is to read the module list rather than the course title.
Look for: what you study in each year, how much is compulsory versus optional, how it is assessed, and whether a placement year is available and how it is arranged.
- The year-by-year module list, not the summary paragraph
- The balance of examination, coursework and project work
- Whether the placement year is offered, and who finds the placement
- What graduates of that specific course go on to do
Work backwards from the career, not forwards from the grades
If you do not yet know the subject, the most productive move is not to browse course lists — it is to look at where you want to end up. Careers list the degree subjects that lead to them, and most of them lead from more than one. Starting there usually collapses a list of forty possible courses into three or four that are genuinely worth reading properly.
Then, and only then, look at universities
Once you have two or three courses, the university question becomes answerable: which of the places teaching this course fits the cost, the city, the entry requirements and the support you need? That is a comparison with real criteria in it. Reputation, at that point, is one input among several rather than the whole basis of the shortlist.