Aston has always gloried in its role as a tight-knit, vocational, urban university, which has swum against the tide of British higher education over the past decade.

Small and lively, set in the heart of Birmingham, it has remained resolutely specialist in science and technology, business and languages, concentrating on the sandwich degrees which have served its graduates so well in the employment market.

The mix helped Aston break into the top 20 in The Times table over the last three years, although it has slipped back this year, mainly due to less favourable staffing levels and lower spending on student facilities.

Despite some modest growth recently, the university still has little more than 7,000 undergraduates.

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This used to make for a bumpy ride financially, with the funding council having to provide special help several times to avoid damaging budget cuts. But now, with healthy funding from industry and commerce, Aston is able to invest in its future, boosting staffing in business, engineering and languages, and developing the campus.

Access

Applications were near the national average at the start of 2007, following strong growth in the previous year. Even though entry grades have been rising, the general trend has been upwards for most of the decade. There were much-improved research grades in the last assessment exercise, with four of the five subject areas judged to be producing work of international quality.

Business and management, languages and European studies, general engineering and neurosciences all achieved top scores. Academic restructuring, designed mainly to break down barriers between departments, has since reduced the number of schools to four. As befits a one-time college of advanced technology, Aston’s strengths are on the science side, although the business school is highly rated and accounts for almost half of the students.

Development

A £20-million extension to the business school has seen an increase in staff from 80 to over 120. After a bruising introduction to the teaching quality assessments, ratings improved considerably, with maximum points for pharmacy, business and management and good scores for optometry and biological sciences. There is a wide range of combined honours programmes for those who prefer not to specialise.

Four out of five Aston graduates go straight into jobs, spurning the postgraduate courses and training programmes which have become the first port of call for many of their counterparts in the old universities. Often they are returning to the scene of work placements, which have become the norm for 70 per cent of Aston’s undergraduates.

The university is flexible about entry requirements for mature students, but average entry grades for school-leavers have now reached 350 points and the rising demand for places is likely to prolong the trend. The dropout rate has been improving and is now well below the 12 per cent national average for Aston’s subjects. Socially, the intake is diverse, with more than a third of the undergraduates coming from working-class homes.

Student scene

The 40-acre campus, a ten-minute walk from the centre of Birmingham, is barely recognisable from the university’s early days. Carefully landscaped, it has benefited from a £16-million building programme, which has brought all Aston’s residential and academic accommodation onto the same site.

Almost half of the undergraduates live there, with places guaranteed for first years. New developments in sporting facilities have included the addition of a new gymnasium, while an £8-million Academy of Life Sciences merges research with private practice in eye care and brain imaging. Another £4 million has been spent upgrading the IT and computing network.

Aston was among the pioneers of “smart cards”, giving students access to university facilities and enabling them to make purchases on campus, once they have money in their accounts. There is plenty of opportunity to use them in a buzzing social scene, which most students find to their taste. The guild of students has always been very active, both socially and politically.

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