UK's first purpose-built university in over 40 years aimed at 'alarming' engineering shortage

In September, the UK will get its first new purpose-built university in more than 40 years, and it’s all for engineering.

The New Model in Technology and Engineering (NMiTE) is a government-backed initiative to try to address the alarming shortage of engineering graduates.

The project, which will be located in a purpose-built city-centre campus in Hereford, has received millions of pounds in funding. It will take an approach to teaching that’s radically different from most universities, with the aim of producing graduates with the transferable skills that employers need. 

Courses will be compressed into fewer years than at other universities, as students at NMiTE will forgo the usual long holidays. 

Breaking the mould

There will also be a focus on hands-on work experience during the course, as firms have complained that many graduates lack the ability to hit the ground running.

“NMiTE will firmly break the mould of engineering higher education,” says Professor Martin Gillie, who left the University of Warwick in February to become NMiTE’s provost and chief academic officer. 

He says the launch of the new university is “hugely timely, given the complex engineering challenges we face, whether it is the arrival of driverless transport, harnessing the Internet of Things, applying artificial intelligence or preserving the world’s limited resources as the population approaches
8 billion globally”.

The university has already recruited an initial ‘pioneer cohort’ of undergraduates who will start their courses next September, and by 2020 it’s expected that at least 150 students will be based at the new site. The aim, by 2032, is for NMiTE to be educating more than 5,000 engineering students.