The Sunday Times September 10, 2006

Manchester voted best university
Jonathan Milne

Vibrant atmosphere and academic excellence create a global player

ITS students have a reputation for sex and drug-taking and the city has produced some of Britain's best-known bands. Now the pull of Manchester has been recognised with its naming today as Sunday Times University of the Year. Many of the students — it attracts more applications than anywhere else in Britain — may be drawn to the party atmosphere of the city, but Manchester University is now planning to propel itself into the global premier league of academia.

It has begun a campaign to hire five Nobel prize winners and embarked on a £350m programme of new buildings and refurbishments, the biggest capital spending plan in British higher education.

Manchester's emerging status as a national and international competitor has been shown in its steady rise up the league tables. It is ranked 15th this year, up three places from last year, in the overall ranking in the Sunday Times University Guide, published today.

The city's reputation as a lively place for students together with Manchester's position as Britain's biggest university also helped attract 62,000 applicants this year, the highest figure anywhere in the country.

The university aims to become one of the world's top 25 by 2015, a move that Alan Gilbert, the vice-chancellor, said would bring "tangible benefits for students", including the presence of the Nobel winners. It has already recruited Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel economist, to work part-time at Manchester.

Although the teaching and research excellence of Cambridge mean it tops the Sunday Times league table — as it has every year since it was first published in 1998 — Manchester leads a strong tier of universities outside the traditional "ivy league" of Oxbridge and London colleges that dominate the top five places.

This group of consistent strong performers includes institutions such as Nottingham, York, Durham, Warwick, Bristol, and Exeter, named runner-up to Manchester as university of the year. With students becoming increasingly sophisticated in how they choose universities, this tier is attracting growing numbers of highly qualified candidates, targeting particular highly rated departments.

Research for the guide also shows how highly some universities are rated by the academic community. A combined league table only using the rankings given by head teachers and university academics puts Manchester at 10th — higher than its league-table placing.

Birmingham, Southampton and the University of the Arts in London, which groups together the capital's art and design schools, are all highly rated on this measure.

Along with the university's academic reputation, Manchester's reputation as a "party city" is a strong draw for young students.

Research quoted in the Sunday Times University Survival Guide, published in today's Magazine, finds its students are the most fashion-conscious and that the city has the best reputation for overall student lifestyle (it also finds they are national leaders in sex and drug-taking, based on a 1999 survey by the Adam Smith Institute), while the city also has a lively gay scene.

Much of the credit for Manchester's steady progress has been due to Gilbert, an Australian, who was headhunted to lead the merger between the Victoria University of Manchester and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology to form a single university in the city in 2004.

This weekend he said he believed Manchester had the potential to become a global knowledge "spike" in medical research — especially cancer — and nuclear technology.

This year a Manchester team won University Challenge for the first time. The BBC is also contributing to the city's rising profile with the building of a big new broadcasting centre in Salford, Greater Manchester.

Labour has picked up on the city's fashionable image to choose it as the venue for the party conference later this month.

Stiglitz, head of Manchester's new poverty research institute in addition to his job at Columbia University, New York, compared the Mancunian renaissance to that of his home city.

"New York went through a bad period in the 1970s and early 1980s — people were very pessimistic," said Stiglitz, who won his Nobel in 2001 for work on development economics. "Cities can go through a bad period and then revive and reinvent themselves. I see Manchester reinventing itself."