Loughborough has had the most satisfied undergraduates of any conventional university in two of the first three National Student Surveys.

In 2007, five of the university’s subjects were ranked top in the UK – civil engineering; chemical, process and energy engineering; materials and minerals technology; information services; and other technological subjects.

Loughborough also won the first two Times Higher Education awards for best student experience, after separate national polls of undergraduates.

The message has begun to get through to sixth-formers with better than average applications in 2007 and 2008.

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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 rivalling Oxbridge in its teaching quality ratings, which averaged no less than 22 points out of 24. The best results came in information science and human sciences.

Subjects

The Office for Standards in Education also rates Loughborough in its top category for teacher training in physical education, design and science. The built environment, sociology and sports science reached the top rung of the research assessment ladder in 2001, when almost half of the academics entered for assessment were in the top two categories.

Loughborough merged with the neighbouring colleges of education and art and design, giving a more balanced mix between arts and science, and making the university less male-dominated. 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.

The original 216-acre campus has benefited from a construction programme which included a large student union extension and a new business school, as well as the gradual refurbishment of residential accommodation. Nearly 5,000 rooms now all have telephone and internet connections and another 1,300 rooms are on the way in four new halls, representing the biggest single investment in the university’s history.

Development

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. Representative teams have a record second to none and the programme of sports scholarships is the largest in the university system. The heavily over-subscribed 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 highperformance training centre for athletics.

Olympics

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 a £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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