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The students’ union was named as the seventh greenest organisation in the UK in the inaugural Sunday Times Green List in May, having doubled its recycling and cut its energy consumption by 35% in a year. It also won the award for best small company with a low environmental impact.

Loughborough is about as far removed from ivory towered academia as it is possible to be. There is space in the organisation, Loveday says, for fundamental thinkers, but a huge swathe of the research work undertaken has practical applications.

This is best recognised through the awarding of Queen’s Anniversary Prizes for higher education. Loughborough won its sixth last year, more than any other university. The most recent award was for work in vehicle safety and driver tiredness and its contribution towards reducing the number of deaths on the road.

Loughborough won its first in 1994 for its collaborative work with automotive and aerospace companies such as BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and Ford. In 1998, another followed for work in providing and managing sustainable infrastructures for clean water, sanitation and roads in developing countries.

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Research in optical engineering was recognised in 2000, and two years later it was the turn of sports research, education and development. In 2005, a fifth award was made for work in evaluating and helping to develop social policy-related programmes. Loveday says: “The Queen’s Anniversary Prizes are a resounding endorsement of our relationship with industry. They show what we do influences, changes practice and makes a real difference.”

The 433-acre campus is home to all the university’s departments and facilities as well as about 5,000 students, about half of the full-time undergraduates. The student population is among the youngest anywhere. Barely 5% are mature entrants (aged over 21 when they commence their studies) and few drop out, which suggests the high student satisfaction scores are no accident.

“There is a genuine caring about students here wherever they come from,” says Pearce, “and there was for a long time before the term ‘student experience’ was coined.”

Two Times Higher Education awards for best student experience and outstanding support for overseas students further testify to the quality on offer. However, it is impossible to conclude any citation of the university’s excellence without returning to sport. Its contribution to the national sporting scene over a number of years has been immense. The man who brought the Olympics to London, Sebastian (now Lord) Coe, is himself a Loughborough graduate.

The Loughborough team in Beijing was its biggest at any Olympics. So big that a Loughborough Lodge — “We thought Loughborough Embassy sounded too grandiose,” says Chris Earle, director of sport — was set up there to support athletes’ families and friends, to host alumni, recruit new students and provide a base from which to generally showcase Loughborough to the wider world.

At the 2006 Commonwealth games in Melbourne, students won 30 medals, eight of them gold, which would have ranked the university eighth in the final medals table in its own right. Closer to home, it has dominated university sport in the UK, with 27 successive championship titles for the men, 29 for the women.

Imperial College London, our runner-up for University of the Year, also deals in a currency of academic excellence. Up to third place in our rankings and fifth in the world university listings, it broke from the University of London last year and now awards its own degrees. There is nowhere better to study science and engineering in the UK.

Under the stewardship of the former rector, Sir Richard Sykes (who stepped down this summer), Imperial saw its research income grow to £230m in 2006-7, and gains more than £37m a year from global industry for research. In 2007, it won the Best Supporter of British Industry award at the inaugural Best of British Industry awards, sponsored by The Sunday Times.

Only LSE graduates command higher salaries and secure more graduate-level jobs. Imperial Innovations commercialises intellectual property and has established more than 70 spin-out companies and filed nearly 80 patents from Imperial’s research work.

Southampton makes our shortlist for the second time, having risen in our rankings to 12th, one short of its high of 11th in 2002. Like Imperial, it is a member of the 20-strong elite Russell Group of research-led universities. It was the only one with four 5* rated engineering departments at the time of the last assessments in 2001 and has high hopes of repeating that success when the new ratings are announced in December.

Investment totalling £236m is putting the finishing touches to a complete overhaul of its Southampton campuses. The new Mountbatten building will provide world-class facilities for the school of electronics and computer science and new accommodation for the school of life sciences will be completed by spring 2010. Students appreciate the improvements: the dropout rate is about half the expected level.

Sheffield, our University of the Year in 2001, makes our shortlist after achieving its highest ranking in seven years. The 11th most popular university in terms of applications, Sheffield’s average student satisfaction score is up this year from 74.4% to 77.7%. Few universities can match its 30 subjects rated excellent for teaching and last year it won a Queen’s Anniversary Prize for its outstanding manufacturing research centre, run with Boeing to pool scientific expertise and technological innovations to create more energy-efficient aircraft.

Our shortlist is completed by Aston University, Birmingham. Never ranked higher than this year’s position of 29th, it earns its listing for its excellent record in producing employable graduates. Ranked eighth in the UK for the proportion of students gaining graduate-level jobs within six months of leaving (82.7%), Aston’s students have an edge in the jobs market at a time when there has never been so many graduates.

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