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 university has had a spectacular rise up the pecking order of higher education.

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In less than 20 years, it went from being a solid civic university to a prime alternative to Oxbridge. Currently in the top 70 in the world rankings published by The Times Higher Education and QS, it seldom stands still.

Access

The lifting of restrictions on student recruitment allowed the university to make room for 750 more students, 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 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 stateschool teenagers and a bursary scheme, which pre-dated top-up fees, for Nottinghamshire students with no family history of higher education. 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.

Development

The campus is undergoing further £200- million expansion to accommodate an innovation park and will acquire a landmark sculpture towering 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. Nottingham describes itself as “research-led”, with work carried out at the university winning two Nobel Prizes in 2003. Professor 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.

Research

The university’s record-breaking research contracts place it among the top four universities for private funding. However, the last research assessments were disappointing by the university’s high standards, with only five subjects awarded the coveted 5* rating – American studies, German, Iberian languages, music and theology – with 26 more subjects on the next assessment grade.

The university has devoted about £70 million to a research recruitment initiative in advance of the 2008 assessments. It has filled 20 research chairs and invested in the equipment and support posts to accompany them. Recent developments include a £7-million biomedical sciences building on the main campus and a £10-million graduate-entry outpost for the medical school in Derby. Most teaching assessments were excellent, with classics, economics and politics joining psychology and manufacturing engineering leading the way. Classics, languages and biology were the top scorers in the latest National Student Survey.

International

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 will 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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