Nottingham is the nearest Britain has to a truly global university, with campuses in China and Malaysia modelled on a headquarters that is among the most attractive in Britain.

For many years it has been among the institutions with the stiffest competition for each place, and a striking new campus and extra courses made the university even more fashionable.

Growth in applications has resumed after a two-year blip fuelled by media coverage of gun crime early in the decade. The demand for places was up by almost 8 per cent at the start of 2009.

The university enjoyed a spectacular rise up the pecking order of higher education. In less than 20 years, it went from being a solid civic university to a prime alternative to Oxbridge. Currently in the top 90 in the world rankings published by Times Higher Education and QS, it seldom stands still.

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Research-led

Nottingham describes itself as “research-led”, with work carried out at the university winning two Nobel Prizes in 2003. Professor Sir Peter Mansfield, who won the prize for medicine for research leading to the development of the MRI scanner, has spent almost all his academic career there. The university’s record-breaking research contracts place it among the top four universities for private funding.

About £70 million was spent on a research recruitment initiative in advance of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, with 20 new research chairs and the equipment and support posts to accompany them. The investment paid off handsomely with sharply improved results in the RAE, which will bring long-term increases in funding. Almost 60 per cent of a big submission was judged to be world-leading or internationally excellent, with pharmacy and Spanish, Portugese and Latin American studies producing the best results in the UK and chemistry and physics the second-best.

Development

Physical expansion allowed the university to take almost 1,000 more students in recent years, but new undergraduates’ average A-level grades have not dropped. Once in, they tend to stay the course – the dropout rate of 3 per cent is consistently among the best in the country. But the university is trying to broaden an intake which has more independent school students and fewer from working-class homes than the national average for the subjects offered. There is a well-established summer school for state-school teenagers and a bursary scheme, which pre-dated top-up fees, for Nottinghamshire students with no family history of higher education. Results have been consistently good in the National Student Survey, with chemists, civil engineers and music students the most satisfied.

The 30-acre Jubilee campus, which cost £50 million and includes 750 residential places, is barely a mile away from the original parkland site. Futuristic buildings clustered around an artificial lake house the schools of management and finance, computer science and education. An additional building for the fast-growing business school was added in 2004 and a new sports hall opened the following year. The campus is undergoing further £200-million expansion to accommodate an innovation park and has acquired a landmark sculpture towering 60 metres over its buildings.

The adjoining medical school is also close to University Park, although its recently established graduate-entry outpost is in Derby. The biosciences and the new veterinary school are at Sutton Bonington, ten miles south of the city. Recent developments include a £7-million biomedical sciences building on the main campus.

Far East links

Nottingham has long-standing links with the Far East, which provides the majority of its 7,000 overseas students, and has a Chinese physicist, Professor Fujia Yang, as its Chancellor. The university has had a branch in Malaysia since 2000 and launched a new venture in Ningbo, China, in 2004. Purpose-built campuses with echoes of the Nottingham’s distinctive clock tower opened in Ningbo and near Kuala Lumpur in September 2005. Students have the opportunity to move between the three countries.

Both main campuses are within three miles of the centre of Nottingham, with a good selection of student-friendly clubs. However, halls of residence and the students’ union tend to be the centre of social life for students in both locations. New bars, café facilities and a nightclub were included in a £1-million makeover of student facilities in 2007. Sports facilities are excellent and expanding.

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