I have been inspired to do that by the course here.” (Mark Howells, 31, computer science, Kent.) Where’s best for teaching? Imperial College, Cambridge, Exeter, Kent, Oxford, Manchester, Teesside, Warwick, Southampton, Swansea, York, Edin- burgh and Glasgow universities all scored excellent ratings.Where’s best for research? Cambridge, Imperial College, Oxford, Warwick, York and Glasgow received a tip-top 5*. Bath, Bristol, Lancaster, Sussex, Manchester, Southampton, University College London, Dundee and Edinburgh received a 5; Aston, Birmingham, Durham, East Anglia, Essex, Exeter, Goldsmiths, Hertfordshire, Kent, Leeds, Loughborough, Umist, Nottingham, Queen Mary and Westfield, Reading, Royal Holloway, Sheffield, Aberdeen, Heriot-Watt, St Andrews, Swansea, Aberystwyth, Cardiff and Queen’s Belfast received 4. Where’s the cutting edge? Southampton is big on multimedia, artificial intelligence and software engineering; Glasgow in dis- tributed systems, information retrieval, communication and control systems and human computer interaction. Manchester in bio-informatics (the human genome project) and low power mobile processes: that’s making sure mobile phones work. Kent specialises in networks and distributed systems, software and systems engineering and has a computer science education research group.Who are the stars? Dr Dave DeRoure, currently on secondment to BT, and Dr Mark Nixon, both of Southampton. Professor Steve Furber, Professor John Gurd, high performance parallel computing, and Carole Goble, bio- informatics, all at Manchester. Professor Malcolm Atkinson, information retrieval, Professor Keith van Rijsbergen and Professor Muffy Calder, all at Glasgow.

Related courses: You can do computing with virtually any other subject at Glasgow University – for instance with Latin or Russian.. In his landmark Greenwich speech in February, the Education Secretary, David Blunkett, lit a fuse which is now beginning to fizz. The headline-grabbing bits – e-universities and foundation degrees – were part of a grand vision for higher education. Colleges and universities in the United Kingdom face intense global competition from other countries and corporations, he said. High quality is essential, but institutions should not be trying to be all things to all men, as at present That is inefficient and wasteful, he implied. Why should all institutions be engaged in research and aping the old élite university? Instead, they should play to their strengths.

In his landmark Greenwich speech in February, the Education Secretary, David Blunkett, lit a fuse which is now beginning to fizz. The headline-grabbing bits – e-universities and foundation degrees – were part of a grand vision for higher education. Colleges and universities in the United Kingdom face intense global competition from other countries and corporations, he said. High quality is essential, but institutions should not be trying to be all things to all men, as at present That is inefficient and wasteful, he implied. Why should all institutions be engaged in research and aping the old élite university? Instead, they should play to their strengths.
The University of Poppleton should concentrate on what it’s good at, teaching media studies, reaching out to the community and recruiting ethnic minorities, while Ivy Clad University should carry on being excellent in research and turning out some of the best graduates in science and technology. Moreover, he added, universities needed to forge alliances and to collaborate with one another and with the private sector. They should share expertise and resources rather than compete, thereby becoming more innovative and responding better to students and employers.It so happens many of these views are shared by higher education experts, notably Professor Howard Newby, Vice-chancellor of Southampton University and president of the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals, who believes the university system needs restructuring.