Choosing Your University - All You Need To Know

Resources

As you read through this page, you will be constantly be asking yourself: "Yes, but where can I find out the answers to the questions." There are some excellent books which describe the universities and colleges, which tell you what they are good at, and what sort of grades you are going to need for specific courses. For example, the Times Good University Guide has a profile of all the major institutions. The UCAS website also has useful data on every institution, as does the Hero website. The resource links on the right will give you more details of what you can find out where. A brilliant interactive map (see link on the right) which not only shows you where all the universities are but has hundreds of useful links attached has been created by the University of Wolverhampton.

You cannot make an informed decision without putting in lots of research.

In addition, there are prospectuses for all the universities, and every university has a comprehensive website. You can also find "alternative prospectuses" online written by student groups. There's also a book called "Varsity Match" which profiles universities in a nutshell covering topics like student types and profile.

Classification of UK Universities

Each university has a distinct character of its own, and you must consider carefully whether factors such as location (urban/suburban/country, north/south, inland/coastal) size(intimate and quiet/large and metropolitan), type of accommodation on offer and so on. We can broadly categorise the traditional universities as follows:

Civic Universities:

Sited centrally in, and interacting closely with, a major city. Halls of residence (often some distance from the university) have their own community feel.

Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield.

City Campus Universities:

Universities that have developed just outside their cities, often with academic buildings and halls of residence in the same area.

Birmingham, Exeter, Nottingham, Reading, Hull, Leicester, Southampton

Greenfield Campus Universities:

Mainly the 1960s wave of new universities and designed as self-sufficient, self-contained social and academic units.

East Anglia, Essex, Keele, Sussex, Warwick, York

Collegiate Universities:

Much of your work is carried out in your college, although lectures are generally held in the main university buildings.

Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Kent, Lancaster, London.

Technological Universities:

These have their roots in the old technical colleges. They have close links with industry and offer courses with a strong practical and technological bias.

Aston, Bath, Bradford, Brunel, City, Loughborough, Salford, Surrey, UMIST

Scottish Universities:

Almost all courses are for 4 years and you come out with an MA or MSc. Unusual in that you are generally admitted to a faculty and not a department. You select three or four subjects in your first year and can "experiment" in your choices, and are then admitted to your honours course in the second year. Not true of all subjects, though; for example, medicine and law.

Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt, St. Andrews, Stirling, Strathclyde

Northern Irish Universities:

Queen's Belfast, Ulster.

New Universities:

Former Polytechnics became universities in 1992. They are often an amalgamation of several former colleges and can spread across several campuses. At the lower end they can struggle to recruit, but others now compete strongly with the longer established universities and are now, in some cases, harder to get into than the more traditional universities. Some of the more familiar names are:

Anglia, Bournemouth, West of England, Coventry, De Montfort, Greenwich, Hertfordshire, Kingston, Leeds Metropolitan, Luton, Middlesex, North London, Oxford Brookes, Plymouth, Portsmouth, South Bank, Teesside, Westminster.

Making Your Choice

So, the type of university and its location should be important factors to consider at the outset. You should be asking questions about the things which are important to you, for example:

• How strong are the sports, what are the facilities like.
• Would you prefer to be in a city centre with a big student population, or in the more intimate atmosphere of a collegiate university.
• What accommodation can the university offer? With ever increasing numbers, some universities struggle to find accommodation for all first years. Would you like self-catering, or do you want meals provided?
• Consider the financial aspects - your years at university can be a big drain. Is travelling going to be a problem? How expensive is accommodation? What are living costs like?

Now you need to put together the course you want to do and the sort of university you want to go to. Your first key question is:

Do my chosen universities offer my chosen course?

The UCAS website enables you to search for courses at universities, or search by university or geographical area first, and then see what courses are available. Heap - Choosing Your Degree Course and University also lists the universities which offer your subject, and gives a synopsis of the course content and emphasis. The Times Good University Guide and Guardian University Guide are also useful in that they list, for each subject, the top universities graded by their research funding (The Times) and their teaching (The Guardian). But do remember that those universities which appear to be the "best" will also be the hardest to get into, and may not offer exactly the course which you would like.

Equally important:

What are the entry requirements?

There is no point applying for a course where the offer is going to be above your predicted grades. Heap - Degree Course Offers lists every offer for every course. You can also choose a course and run through a list of universities in decreasing order of offer. The UCAS website also contains "Entry Profiles." This sets out what grades you are likely to need to gain entry to a course, as well as other qualifications (eg: Maths GCSE). Visit AR in the Universities and Careers department for information on how best to navigate the UCAS website. It looks complicated because there are so many different routes into university. See the page on the UCAS Tariff for more details about entry requirements.

Statistics

There are many sources of statistics about universities and their departments. Typically, you should interest yourself in figures such as:

• How well is the department rated for Teaching Quality?
• What is the ratio of applicant to places?
• What is the dropout rate from the course?
• How is the quality of the department's research rated?
• How good is the employability of graduates from your chosen universities?

Remember, you are not simply looking for "the best" - you want to find the course and the university that suits you, and that may well be at university number 43 in some league table or other.

What to do next

Once you have narrowed down your search you need to start studying prospectuses and think about visiting a few universities. See the page on prospectuses and open days for more detail. The Universities and Careers Centre can look at records of Tonbridgians who are at university at the moment and tell you who went where. You should also discuss choices with your housemaster and the appropriate heads of departments. Other pages you should now be consulting are: