Wolverhampton’s success in widening participation in higher education is such that it is the only university in Britain where a majority of undergraduates come from working-class homes.

Almost all the students are from state schools and almost one in five comes from an area of low participation in higher education.

Strongly regional in outlook, the university draws two thirds of its 24,000 students from the West Midlands, although there is a growing contingent from overseas – the university has offices in China, India, Poland and Nigeria.

A third of the places are filled by mature students and the campuses have a cosmopolitan feel, with about the same proportion coming from the region’s ethnic minorities.

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Pioneering

Wolverhampton pioneered the high street “higher education shop” and more recently, a dedicated Student Finance Support Unit and Student Gateway Service, bringing all student support together in one convenient location. Big outreach programmes take courses into the workplace.

The four campuses each have their own learning centres and are linked by a free bus service. Two are in the city, while sport and performance, education and part of the School of Health are based in Walsall. The original site is in the heart of the city centre. A purpose-built campus in Telford focuses on business and engineering for a county with no higher education institution of its own.

Investment

The university has been investing millions of pounds in an infrastructure programme known as “New Horizons”, which is almost complete.

The project has seen £26 million spent on the City Campus, notably on the flagship Millennium City Building, an extension of the Harrison Learning Centre, a new technology centre with 600 PCs and a teaching and administration building. A 350-bed student village has opened on the Walsall campus, together with a Lottery-supported sports hall offering elite training facilities for judo and a Sports Science and Medicine Centre that are being used to train Olympic contenders.

A £12-million building for the School of Education and the Institute for Learning Enhancement opened in 2008. At Telford the £7-million e-Innovation Centre has already won awards for the incubation and support it offers to e-businesses.

The latest statistics show an improvement in the projected dropout rate, but still more than one in five of those who entered in 2005 may fail to complete their courses in the expected time. Wolverhampton insists that the actual dropout rate is much lower.

The university runs a national teaching centre focusing on retention, progression and achievement. Teacher training courses are rated in the top four in the country by Ofsted, and Wolverhampton academics have been awarded five National Teaching Fellowships by the Higher Education Academy. But the university was in the bottom 20 in the 2008 National Student Survey. Only building, languages and mass communications and documentation satisfied more than 85 per cent of the students.

The university claims a number of firsts for its academic programmes, pioneering interactive multimedia communication degrees, as well as offering the only degree in British sign language and one of the first in virtual reality design and manufacturing. It was the first university to be registered under the British Standard for the quality of its all-round provision.

Wolverhampton was also the first to open a student employment bureau with an online jobs vacancy service that has since been adopted by many other institutions. The university stresses innovation and enterprise in its work with students and businesses, encouraging student “start up” companies and leading a project to develop student placements in their own companies for those who wish to become entrepreneurs.

Research

Research is mainly applied, serving the needs of business and industry, as well as underpinning teaching at all levels. The main strengths are in applications of computing and biomedical science, including ground-breaking work on brain tumours.

In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, Wolverhampton was ranked fourth in the UK for statistical cybermetrics (the analysis of web content and traffic) and sixth for computational linguistics. A relatively low proportion of the academics were entered for assessment, but 30 per cent of their research was considered world-leading or internationally excellent.

Social facilities vary considerably between sites. Wolverhampton has a growing nightlife and the university has been voted the friendliest in the West Midlands. The cost of living is reasonable and the attractions of Birmingham are now only a metro tramride away.

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