Paula Radcliffe ran for miles, landed a first-class degree and met her husband here. Last week, in a result that will turn people’s perception of “the best universities” on its head, Loughborough in Leicestershire — the campus often pigeonholed as “the place for sport” — emerged at the head of a nationwide poll of 170,000 students.
The first ever survey of how satisfied final-year students are with their degree courses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland has thrown up a surprising new hierarchy. Overall, 21st-century students identified campus universities as the best and ones in London as the worst. East Anglia and Leicester — as well as Loughborough — are among the students’ top 10 of more than 100 universities. (Though all full-time universities were pipped by the Open University, which offers part-time degrees.)
In London the picture is bleak. Eight of the poll’s bottom 10 universities are in the capital, and even Imperial, University College London and the LSE, generally thought of as world-class, don’t make it into the top 20.
Last week government chiefs told vice-chancellors “to start asking some very searching questions”. The warning was issued by Sir Howard Newby, chief executive of the quango that helped organise the survey. It has posted the results on a website to give youngsters — who from next autumn will pay much higher fees — more information about universities’ performance. Newby said there were “a lot of surprises. Less fashionable universities come out of this extremely well”.
The Sunday Times calculated the student satisfaction rating for each university by analysing all 170,000 responses to the 22-question survey. Each question was weighted equally and different response rates across departments were taken into account to produce the scores. Oxford, Cambridge and Warwick are not included — students there boycotted the poll. Scottish universities were also not part of the survey because the questionnaire was not adopted by the Scottish executive.
To those in the know, Loughborough’s triumph isn’t too surprising. This 1960s university has been quietly building its profile in recent years: its most popular courses are hugely competitive. “To get into sports science here, discloses vice-chancellor Sir David Wallace, “is a bit like getting into medicine or law. You usually need three As.”
Loughborough drama graduate Becky Dicks personifies the survey’s findings. Raised in London, Dicks, 22, turned her back on the capital, 100 miles away, when she came to Loughborough three years ago, partly deterred by the fear of racking up huge debts in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Instead she raves about “the Loughborough experience . . . I think it is easily one of the best universities in the UK”, she says.
Although the survey focused on the quality of teaching and learning on degree courses, there is widespread agreement that the potential grimness of student life in London — high rents and crime rates, long commutes and the need to take part-time jobs to make ends meet — may have filtered through into students’ answers.
Mary-Beth Young has just graduated in psychology from University College London (28th in the survey). She owes £15,000 and to stop it going any higher had to take three part-time jobs while studying. Although she says her course was excellent, she admits that “if I was starting again next September, when students will pay £3,000 fees a year, I might go elsewhere”.
At some London universities the verdict is bolstered by other statistics: showing scarily high drop-out rates. At East London, Middlesex, Greenwich and London South Bank universities, one in four students failed to complete their course. The national average is about 14%.
Phillip Kitcher’s story was featured in The Sunday Times last week. He’d quit his job as a senior nurse to study law at Greenwich. At the end of his first year Kitcher failed his exams. He discovered that high failure and drop-out rates were not uncommon. The previous year one in three students had failed to continue to the second year. “I was was never told that there was such a low probability of getting the qualification,” he said.
Luckily, Kitcher’s story has a happy ending. Although he was “frightened” by his experience as well as around £12,000 in debt, he resumed his nursing career and also enrolled on a bachelor of science course at the University of Hertfordshire. This summer he gained his degree.
Kitcher welcomes the new website and urges students to “ask more questions of their chosen universities before accepting a place”.
It’s a desire shared by ministers — who must be a little worried that complaints and even litigation over inadequate teaching may soar once students start paying serious money for degrees. “This is about empowering students,” says Bill Rammell, minister for higher education. “Over time the website will identify those institutions and courses that are not coming up to scratch and force them to change or close.”
The only question that remains is — how long will it take?
Additional reporting by Alastair McCall
For more information, visit www.tqi.ac.uk
