Dundee describes itself as “Scotland’s most enterprising university” and, while there would be other claimants to that title, it has certainly been among the liveliest in recent years.

A long series of good quality ratings and the acquisition of education, nursing and art colleges, which doubled its size and greatly increased its scope, have been complemented by high-profile research successes, especially in medicine and the life sciences.

The message appears to be getting through to prospective students: applications shot up by 88 per cent in five years, and the 16 per cent increase at the start of 2008 was comfortably the highest in Scotland.

The university now has about 18,000 students, two-thirds of undergraduates and including a healthy number from overseas. It has been looking outwards to achieve the “critical mass” which experts regard as essential to break into the higher education elite, appointing professors at the rate of one a month for four years.

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Development

A £200-million campus redevelopment designed by the leading architect, Sir Terry Farrell, is now complete. Almost £40 million of this was spent on wireless-networked student residences. A new teaching block houses education and social work, which moved onto the main campus in 2008, and there have been extensions to the library and the sports centre. Best-known for the life sciences, where research into cancer and diabetes is recognised as world-class, the university had already opened new buildings for interdisciplinary research, applied computing and clinical research.

Set in 20 acres of parkland, the medical school is the one of the few components of the university outside the compact city-centre campus – some of the nursing and midwifery students are 35 miles away in Kirkcaldy, while education and social work are waiting to move from the former Northern College campus, two miles outside the centre.

Biochemistry is the flagship department, housed in the £13-million Wellcome Trust Building. Its academics were the first in Britain to be invited to take part in Japan’s Human Frontier science programme and are now the most-quoted researchers in their field. Indeed, three out of 20 of the UK's most cited scientists - Professor Sir David Lane (cancer), Professor Sir Philip Cohen (diabetes and cell signalling) and Professor Peter Downes (cell signalling) - are based at the university.

More than half the work submitted for the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise was rated world-leading or internationally excellent. Dundee recorded the best results in Scotland for art and design, civil engineering, biological and laboratory-based clinical sciences. Undergraduates in English and politics were almost 100 per cent satisfied in the National Student Survey published in 2008. Medicine and architecture, building and planning also recorded extremely high levels of satisfaction.

Employment

Vocational degrees predominate, helping to produce the university’s consistently good graduate employment record. The university sends more graduates into the professions than any other institution in Scotland and only Oxbridge graduates came out ahead of Dundee’s in a national survey of starting salaries. All degrees include a career planning module and an internship option, and students are now provided with their own personal development website. Among the new courses introduced recently are forensic anthropology, sports biomedicine and innovative product design. The highly rated design courses are taught at the former Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art.

Access

There has been an emphasis on opportunities for women ever since Dundee’s separation from St Andrews University in 1967, and the addition of teacher training has increased the female majority. Two thirds of Dundee’s students are from Scotland and nearly one in ten from Northern Ireland. One in five come from areas with little tradition of higher education and more than a quarter are from working-class homes. They enjoy a welcoming atmosphere and a cost of living which is lower than in most university cities. Private accommodation is plentiful for those who are not housed by the university. New students even have their own website. The city is profiting from recent regeneration programmes and becoming more fashionable. Spectacular mountain and coastal scenery are close at hand, but social life tends to be concentrated on the students’ union, which is one of the largest and most active in Scotland.

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