Helping to create a new university for one of the UK’s fastest-growing cities, providing public service education for the NHS and police, aiming for research “relevant to the local populations we serve” – Anglia Ruskin University bills its Times Higher Education University of the Year award as recognition of years of work and an antidote to negative press coverage of universities.
Award judges described ARU – which has campuses across the east of England in Cambridge, Chelmsford and now Peterborough, plus a London branch – as a “university that knows what and who it is for, and is delivering”.
“We’re a regional university; we do a lot of really positive public service work; we’re really proud of our widening participation credentials” alongside “really great outcomes” for graduates, said James Rolfe, ARU’s chief operating officer.
ARU recruits heavily from some of the most deprived areas in the east and across the UK, he added, while being ranked in the top 15 per cent in the country for graduates in employment or further study after graduation, and third in the country for graduates employed as managers, directors or senior officials, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency’s Graduate Outcomes survey.
