The UK's most bike-friendly universities

Biking is big business in Cambridge and for the 12,000 or so students there are 6,200 bike spaces dotted around what is the UK's second oldest university. Bike theft is Cambridge's biggest crime with nearly 3,000 stolen from the city centre last year. Buying a decent lock, however, shouldn't be a problem with more than 20 bike shops in the town to choose from.

The data used in this gallery comes from the annual Estates Management Statistics courtesy of the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).

Picture: Rob / Alamy

Universities see 20,000 fewer applications as tuition fees put off students

With fees set to treble to a maximum of ￡9,000 in 2012, applications from UK students alone are down by 15.1 per cent, according to statistics published by Ucas.

But while fewer UK students are applying to university, the number of applicants from overseas, outside of the EU, has risen by 11.8 per cent, the data shows.

In total, 23,427 fewer people have applied to start degree courses at UK universities next autumn than at the same point last year.

Ucas insisted that it was too early to make predictions about the demand for higher education next year.

Would-be students have until January 15 to apply for courses beginning next autumn.

Today's figures show that 133,357 UK applicants have applied so far, a drop of 23,759 compared to the same point last year.

Applications from other EU students are down 13.1 per cent to 9,034.

The figures also show that the largest fall is among Scottish applicants.

Applications from Scottish students are down 17.1 per cent, English students 15.2 per cent, Welsh students 10.3 per cent and Northern Irish students 16.9 per cent.

The statistics also show that 13,665 fewer women have applied so far this year, compared to 9,762 fewer men.

Ucas chief executive Mary Curnock Cook said: "Recent changes in high education funding mean that application patterns this year may be different to previous years and we are gearing up for a possible late surge close to the January 15 deadline where applicants have taken more time to research their applications.

"We expect some depression of demand due to a decline in the young population but it is much too early to predict any effects from changes in tuition fees."

Dr Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group of leading universities, said: "It would be no real surprise if overall applications through Ucas are somewhat lower for 2012 entry than for 2011, but we shouldn't rush to assume that this is due to higher fees.

"For one thing, demographic change means there will be fewer 18-year-olds leaving school or college in 2012 than in 2011.

"We also know that in 2011 there was a drop in numbers opting for a 'gap year', meaning more applications in 2011, and fewer applications for 2012 entry. Current 2012 figures are actually very similar to figures at the same point in 2010.

"The decrease in the number of Scottish applicants to Scottish universities, where there are no fees, also shows that decrease in England cannot simply be explained by the new fees and funding system."

Professor Les Ebdon, chair of think-tank million+ and vice-chancellor of Bedfordshire University, said: "Universities are working hard to ensure that students understand that studying for the degree you need to get the job you want remains one of the best career moves that you can make, especially in uncertain economic times.

"One in four first time undergraduates is a mature student. Many study later because they realise that they have missed out on the life-changing employment and learning opportunities that studying for a degree offers. No-one should lose the chance to be what they might have been.

"Ministers need to up their game and should launch a campaign in the new year to ensure that older students understand the new loan system and the opportunities available."

Universities to pay cash incentives to attract students

At City University London, scholarships of ￡3,000 will be paid to AAB plus students in each year of a three or four year degree, subject to them passing their university exams. ?Photo: ALAMY

Institutions across the country, including City University London, and Leicester, Surrey and Northumbria universities, are introducing payments to attract candidates with the best exam grades.

The non-means tested academic rewards are in response to new Government rules which allow universities to take unlimited numbers of sixth formers gaining at least two As and a B at A-level - known as AAB+ students.

With the new freedom to recruit more high-achieving students, less prestigious institutions fear that good quality applicants will increasingly be poached by higher ranking universities.

In the first signs of a "scholarship arms race", universities are now vying to give the best deals to 2012 students, the first to face tuition fees of up to ￡9,000 a year.

At City University London, scholarships of ￡3,000 will be paid to AAB plus students in each year of a three or four year degree, subject to them passing their university exams.

Surrey University is offering ￡2,000 to candidates who achieve three A grades who select the university as their firm choice, while Northumbria is offering ￡1,000 a year to AAB+ students.

Leicester, which is ranked in the top 20 of UK institutions, is offering ￡2,000 awards each year over three years for students gaining three A grades.

Departmental scholarships of ￡1,250, paid towards tuition fees, will also be given to students who meet specific course requirements.

Universities with the highest proportion of students with at least AAB at A-level include Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, London School of Economics, Durham, Bristol, University College London, Warwick, Exeter and Bath.

Many in the list also have the lowest proportions of pupils from state schools and deprived backgrounds.

But institutions in the "squeezed middle" of the league tables are most likely to feel forced to compete financially for students, according to the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi).

"They are vulnerable to losing some of their AAB+ students to more selective, more prestigious, institutions," said Bahram Bekhradnia, Hepi director.

"At the same time they are competing with their peers to hold onto their existing and to recruit additional AAB+ students.

"This is likely to give rise to an arms race of 'merit-based' scholarships – if one university offers them others will be obliged to do so."

Critics of the AAB policy said universities were "fighting over" applicants by offering cash incentives to students who already tended to be from more advantaged backgrounds.

Claire Callender, professor of higher education policy at Birkbeck College, London, said: "All the research from the US which has a long history of scholarships which are purely merit-based shows that they are to the advantage of middle and upper class white students who are the ones who predominantly achieve the necessary test scores."

A spokesman for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, said: "Our reforms free up places at the institutions where students wish to study.

"We have made sure that under new access rules, more support is going to people from disadvantaged backgrounds and they are treated fairly.

"Beyond this, universities are free to use their own resources in any way they choose in order to attract new students."

Universities with the most playing field space

Leeds University tops the list for the university with the most amount of playing field space thanks to its 51 hectares, which roughly amounts to the size of 50 international size rugby pitches.

The information shown is from the academic year 2009/10 and comes courtesy of the Estates Management Statistics, published by HESA.

Universities with the richest students (or parents)

Of the UK's top 20 universities, Prince William's alma mater St Andrews hosts the highest proportion of financially independent students. Among last year's 1,625 first year entrants, 58 per cent lived and studied without the need for a student loan.

The loans referred to in this gallery are student maintenance loans and do not include tuition fee loans. The results exclude EU students.

Universities with the richest students (or parents)

Of the UK's top 20 universities, Prince William's alma mater St Andrews hosts the highest proportion of financially independent students. Among last year's 1,625 first year entrants, 58 per cent lived and studied without the need for a student loan.

The loans referred to in this gallery are student maintenance loans and do not include tuition fee loans. The results exclude EU students.

Universities with the highest drop out rates

The only university based in the Highlands and islands of Scotland, UHI was granted higher education status in 2000 and full universtity status earlier this year. 23.5 per cent of the 85 first year students who went up to study in 2008 didn't return the following year. Five changed institutions and 20 dropped out of higher education.

The information is taken from HESA data of full time first degree students who started university in 2008/9 and didn't return for their second year studies for the the academic year 2009/10

Picture: Nick Carraway / Alamy

Universities 'preparing to cut tuition fees to £7,500'

At least 28 universities are considering cuts to fees to qualify for more student places, according to the Office for Fair Access.?Photo: REX FEATURES

The Office for Fair Access suggested almost a quarter of higher education institutions in England could make last-minute cuts to annual fee levels for students starting courses in 2012.

The move comes after the Coalition announced incentives for universities that charge the lowest fees.

Ministers announced in a White Paper earlier this year that institutions charging ￡7,500 or less would be able to bid for a share of 20,000 funded student places.

More than a third of universities had already outlined plans to charge ￡9,000 a year for a degree – the maximum allowed under a radical shake-up of higher education.

The estimated average fee will be around ￡8,393, it was revealed.

But ministers are desperate to drive fees down to reduce the student loans bill amid fears that billions of pounds handed out to undergraduates will never be paid back.

Offa, which was established by Labour to regulate access to higher education, said on Thursday that 28 universities have now expressed an interest in submitting revised fee plans for 2012.

Eight have already made an application to do change their “access agreement” – a document setting out fee levels and the amount of money to be spent on means-tested bursaries for poor students.

The watchdog refused to reveal the names of the institutions, which will have until November 4 to submit revised agreements.

It comes despite the fact that applications to most universities opened more than a month ago.

The National Union of Students condemned the move.

Toni Pearce, NUS vice-president, said: "The Government's incoherent and unsustainable changes to higher education funding are continuing to wreak havoc on students and universities as ministers realise that they failed to do their sums properly.

"Students looking to assess and compare what support will be available to them will be facing weeks of uncertainty and many will find that vital bursaries have been replaced with tokenistic fee waivers."

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, which represents lecturers, said: “The Government’s fees policy has been a messy disaster from the start.

"Originally we were told fees over ￡6,000 would be the exception rather than the norm. The government budgeted for an average fee of ￡7,500 when the actual figure was almost ￡8,400 and now it has moved the goalposts in a desperate attempt to drive down costs.

“Universities simply cannot do more for less and threatening universities with fewer places if they don’t drop their prices is likely to drive down quality and see successful courses that cost more to run close.”

Universities with the lowest proportion of state school students

The Courthauld Institute of Art, an independent college of the University of London based in Somerset House, last year accepted a majority 54.1 per cent of students from private school backgrounds. 45.9 per cent of those that won a place to study art and art history were from state schools, against a national average of 88.8 per cent.

Picture: Edward Herdwick / Alamy

Universities see 40pc fall in soft subject applications

Applications for Oxford or Cambridge and for any medicine, veterinary or dentistry courses, are down by just 0.8 per cent?Photo: PA

Overall applications for university courses starting in 2012 have fallen by 9 per cent but the subjects worst hit are those which students may consider would offer the least reward and which tend to be offered by the less prestigious institutions.

Applications for 'mass communication and documentation' subjects, such as media studies and PR, have been hit the hardest, falling 40.6 per cent compared to this time last year.

Education courses have also suffered, with applications dropping by 30 per cent while interest in creative arts has dropped by 27.1 per cent and business and administration studies by 26.1per cent.

By comparison, applications for Oxford or Cambridge and for any medicine, veterinary or dentistry courses, for which the deadline was October 15, are down by just 0.8 per cent.

The number of 18-year-old Oxbridge applicants is up by 1.1 per cent on last year, despite a population of 2 per cent fewer 18-year-olds this year compared to last.

Although almost every subject has witnessed a drop in applications, the more traditional university courses such as mathematics, engineering and languages have not fared quite as badly as others.

With three months to go before the final deadline, applications for mathematics and computer science are down 2.6 per cent on this time last year, for law, they are down 5.2 per cent and for linguistics and classics, down 1.7 per cent. Applications for history and philosophical studies are down 5.9 per cent and European language and literature down 10.1%.

A UCAS spokeswoman said that despite the drop, the vast majority of universities surveyed had reported an equal or increased interest in open days, suggesting that students may simply be taking more care over their applications with so much money at stake.

She said: “People want to see where their money is going. They appear to be taking a little more care when deciding and may be less likely to enrol on a course at a university they have not even visited.

“This may simply explain a delay in applying. The figures could still rise over the next three months.”

The cap on tuition fees will almost triple for those starting degree courses next September, rising from ￡3,375 to ￡9,000.

Unions representing university students and lecturers blamed the Government's higher education policies for deterring applicants.

Toni Pearce, vice president of the National Union of Students, said: "The indication is that the confusion caused by the Government's botched reforms is causing young people to, at the very least, hesitate before applying to university.

"Ministers must stop tinkering around the edges of their shambolic reforms, listen to students, teachers and universities, and completely overhaul their white paper before temporary chaos turns into permanent damage to our education system."

Sally Hunt, general secretary for the University and College Union, which represents more than 120,000 academic staff, said: "The Government's fee policies have been a complete mess from day one.

"First, the Government promised that fees of more than ￡6,000 a year would be the exception rather than the rule, but budgeted for an average fee of ￡7,500.

"As everyone predicted, the average fee was far higher than that and, even more predictably, the number of students applying to university has dropped."

But David Willetts, Universities and Science Minister, insisted that it was too early in the applications cycle for data to reveal underlying trends.

He added: “Going to university depends on ability, not the ability to pay. Most new students will not pay upfront, there will be more financial support for those from poorer families, and everyone will make lower loan repayments than they do now once they are in well-paid jobs."

Universities need Pepys as much as Newton

Leszek Borysiewicz: a university is defined by the breadth of its mission?Photo: ADRIAN SHERRATT / REX

For more than 800 years, the University of Cambridge has been a crucible of knowledge and culture. Our students and scholars – from Wordsworth, Wittgenstein and Pepys to Newton, Darwin and Crick – have contributed to society across the centuries. We value, in the widest sense, creativity and research across all disciplines.

Yet the current economic climate is encouraging many outside academia to assess universities’ impact in narrow, utilitarian terms, concentrating only on economic benefit or benefit to individual graduates and their employability. I believe that as global political and economic uncertainty increases, so does the danger of this viewpoint.

Cambridge is rightly celebrated for its innovation in science and technology – from the structure of the atom to the structure of DNA – and the university has more Nobel Prize winners than any other higher education institution in the world, in literature, economics and peace, as well as chemistry, physics and medicine. This reminds us that a university is not defined solely by science and technology but by the breadth of its mission.

And so it is essential that the full range of universities’ contributions is valued appropriately by the society we serve. The arts and humanities – which my colleague Professor Stefan Collini describes as “a series of disciplined attempts to extend and deepen understanding of human activity in its greatest richness and diversity, across times and cultures” – are an indispensable part of that contribution.

I am not alone in my concern. Reflecting on Cardinal Newman’s ideas on the role of the university, my predecessor as vice-chancellor, Professor Dame Alison Richard, observed: “The dichotomy between 'useful’ and 'not useful’ is itself increasingly 'not useful’.” With an anthropologist’s view of the benefits of biodiversity, she made a powerful case for its academic equivalent: “The case for breadth centres on the proposition that the greatest challenges facing the world today are of huge complexity and global scope, best tackled by people whose education enables them to integrate different fields of knowledge and work across conventional academic boundaries.”

As we face the aftermath of one recession and struggle to avoid another, governments are, reasonably, focused on short-term financial perspectives. But as an 800-year-old academic institution and one of the world’s leading universities, Cambridge has a responsibility to take the long – as well as the broad – view.

Recent debates on higher education have focused on undergraduate teaching, obscuring the true scope and nature of universities by neglecting their research role – even though the benefit to students of being taught by those with active research careers is transformative.

To address complex questions of critical importance requires research across many disciplines and over the long term. Cancer prevention offers a good example, not least because the disease presents a complex challenge: the core problem cannot be addressed by science alone.

I trained as a doctor and spent most of my career in academic clinical medicine, studying cervical cancer. A UK-wide vaccination programme has been under way since 2008 and take-up has been excellent. But just as a safe and effective vaccine depends on the best clinical research, in a society that exercises free choice, successful take-up depends on a programme whose acceptability to patients must be informed by rigorous social science research that complements and completes the medical science.

This is not to argue that humanities and social science research exists only to serve science, technology and medicine. Understanding the causes and consequences of human behaviour is an end in itself, and there are many examples of arts and humanities research at Cambridge that bring social benefit or help illuminate pressing global concerns.

Migration and multiculturalism are two of those concerns, and in March this year, Cambridge launched a collaboration with two German universities using the latest research on German history to shed new light on immigration and guest workers.

Given that declining populations mean Western Europe as a whole must face up to a need for immigration, we should welcome the fact that historical scholarship can help inform this debate.

Closer to home, academics from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics recently set up the Cambridge Bilingualism Network. Working in local primary schools where pupils speak dozens of languages, the Network is bringing the latest linguistic research into the classroom to help parents and teachers nurture the gift of bilingualism.

In economic hard times, who will look to the long term? Governments will not; stockmarkets cannot; businesses dare not. Instead, we must look to our universities, which by virtue of their autonomy can build the disciplinary breadth and long-term vision to discharge that responsibility.

Over 800 years we have discharged it to the benefit of Britain and the world, and we discharge it best by remaining committed to the arts and humanities. Cambridge this week is celebrating these disciplines and how they enrich all our lives, in the third annual Festival of Ideas – a showcase for Collini’s description of richness and diversity, across times and cultures.

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz is vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge