Loughborough has been in the top ten universities for student satisfaction every year since the National Student Survey was launched.

In 2008, six of the university’s subjects were ranked top in the UK – chemical engineering, information science, physics, building, materials and ergonomics – and more than nine out of ten undergraduates declared themselves satisfied overall.

Loughborough has also won the first three Times Higher Education awards for best student experience, after separate national polls of undergraduates. The message is getting through to sixth-formers with 19 per cent growth in applications at the start of 2009, following healthy increases in the previous two years.

Still best known for its successes on the sports field, Loughborough has enhanced its academic reputation recently, consistently finishing well up The Times rankings and improving its performance in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise.

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Ratings

Although the results were patchy, more than half of the research in art and design was considered world-leading and there were particularly good results in architecture and sport. The Office for Standards in Education also rates Loughborough in its top category for teacher training in physical education, design and science.

The university remains a major centre of engineering with more than 2,800 students in a £20-million integrated engineering complex. Aeronautical, automotive and civil engineering are particularly strong, although art and design, business and sports science now all have more students than any single branch of the discipline.

Campus

The original 216-acre campus has benefited from a sustained construction programme which included a large student union extension and a new business school, as well as the gradual refurbishment of residential accommodation. The first phase of a £68 million on-campus accommodation development opened in 2008 and more than 5,000 rooms now all have telephone and internet connections. The development will eventually provide another 1,300 new bedrooms in four new halls.

The size of the campus has been increased by 75 per cent following the purchase of the adjacent Holywell Park site. This will become the focus for research and collaboration with industry, including a £59-million BAE-sponsored Systems Engineering Innovation Centre. The university prides itself on a close relationship with industry, which accounts for its record haul of six Queen’s Anniversary Prizes. Arts facilities are improving with the upgrading of the Cope Auditorium to serve the campus and local community. The business school is being extended and a £12.7-million building for Health, Exercise and Biological Sciences is under construction.

Most subjects are available either as three-year full-time or four-to-five-year sandwich courses, which includes a year in industry. This has helped to give graduates an outstanding employment record, as well a dropout rate of less than 5 per cent, which is particularly low for the subjects Loughborough offers. The university is a leader in the use of computer-assisted assessment, offering students the chance to gauge their own progress online.

Sport

Loughborough remains pre-eminent in British university sport, both in terms of facilities and performance. More than 50 past and present students took part in the 2008 Beijing Olympic and Paralympic Games, bringing home three Olympic medals and reaching 19 finals. Representative teams have a record second to none and the programme of sports scholarships is the largest in the university system.

The heavily oversubscribed School of Sport and Exercise Science moved into new premises in 2002, and in recent years the campus has acquired a 50-metre swimming pool, national academies for cricket and tennis, a gymnastics centre and a high-performance training centre for athletics. The university also opened the UK’s only centre for disability sport in 2005 and was shortlisted as a possible training camp for the British team ahead of the 2012 Olympics in London. Joining the Olympic effort will be the new £15-million Sports Technology Institute, as well as enhanced research, innovation and enterprise in sport and leisure in the longer term.

Social activity is concentrated on the students’ union. The relatively small town of Loughborough, a mile away, is never going to be a clubber’s paradise, but both Leicester and Nottingham are within easy reach.

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