Middlesex has been changing the character of its intake, reorganising its courses and becoming more international, and now physical changes are on the way.

A £100-million building programme will concentrate the university on three sites in north London.

The new package may help encourage a revival in recruitment among home students, which has been patchy in recent years.

It was one of the few English universities to register a decline in applications through UCAS in 2007, although the figures for the start of 2008 were around the national average.

Recruitment

Overseas recruitment has been Middlesex’s salvation: foreign undergraduates make up 15 per cent of its intake. A longstanding commitment to Europe sees more than 1,000 students arriving from the Continent and even more come from further afield.

There is a network of 11 regional offices, producing a student population drawn from 130 countries. Its successes in the overseas market won a Queen’s Award for Enterprise and the university has now opened its own campus in Dubai offering business degrees and short courses in a variety of subjects.

Now almost 25,000 strong, including part-timers, the university aims to carry on growing. Partner colleges at home and abroad participate in exchanges and/or offer Middlesex qualifications. The university has reorganised its schools to focus on its strengths in business, computing and the arts.

Flexible

Media students will benefit from a new Skillset Academy, in partnership with Top TV and the SAE Institute. The highly flexible course system allows students to start many courses in January if they prefer not to wait until autumn, and offers the option of an extra five-week session in July and August to try out new subjects or add to their credits.

An experiment bringing forward the start of the academic year to early September has been abandoned, with the result that the first assessments have reverted to after Christmas.

Nine out of ten students take vocational courses, many at postgraduate or subdegree level. The business school is the biggest subject area, but almost half of the undergraduates are on multidisciplinary programmes.

About 42 per cent are over 21 on entry and half of the full-timers come from London. Almost all of the British students are from state schools, 45 per cent of them from working-class homes. The dropout rate had been improving, but the latest projection of more than a quarter failing to complete their chosen course on time is significantly worse than the national average for the university’s subjects and entry qualifications.

Scholarships

Even before the introduction of top-up fees, Middlesex was attempting to attract better-qualified students by offering £1,000-a-year scholarships for UK entrants with 300 UCAS points (the equivalent of three Bs). For some time, the university has been reducing the number of campuses dotted around London’s North Circular Road.

The latest to close will be Enfield in August 2008, its courses transferring to Hendon, where £50 million has already been invested in a library, learning resources centre and roofing in the main quadrangle to provide meeting space. New student facilities, including a fitness suite, expanded nursery and refectory will be available at Hendon for the new academic year to meet the demand from the extra students and staff.

Hendon, which boasts one of the country’s few Real Tennis courts, already housed the business school, but will now add sport and health subjects. The other locations include a picturesque country estate at Trent Park and an art and design campus at Cat Hill. Nurses and other health students are based in four London teaching hospitals and on a campus at Archway which is shared with the University College and Royal Free Hospital medical schools.

There is also a joint degree in veterinary nursing run with the Royal Veterinary College. Middlesex did well in the first of the new institutional audits in 2003, but results from the first three National Student Surveys have been disappointing. It was near the bottom of the table in 2007.

Philosophy secured the university’s best score for teaching quality and has one of Middlesex’s two grade 5 assessments for research, denoting nationally outstanding work and some of international excellence.

History of art was the other top scorer. The number of residential places is planned to double in the next few years from the current 1,900 beds. Sports facilities have been improving and will be better still when the Hendon development is complete.

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