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Meeting of the Parliament 25 September 2013

25 Sep 2013 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

University of Edinburgh

Brown, Gavin Con Lothian Watch on SPTV

I congratulate Jim Eadie on securing the debate and giving a particularly interesting speech on the history of the University of Edinburgh. Marco Biagi talked about his spurning the university. I have a similar tale, except that it was the other way round, because the University of Edinburgh spurned me when my exam results were not quite what I had hoped they would be.

However, let us skip over that and congratulate the staff and students of the University of Edinburgh on getting a terrific ranking result based on all that they have done over the past 12 months. I had a little look at the QS report and the points that served Edinburgh so well. The areas that were looked at include academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty student ratio, international indicators and citations per faculty. Of course, as we would expect, Edinburgh scored highly on all of those. However, in the area of academic reputation, to which all speakers have referred, Edinburgh got a score of 99.7 out of a possible 100. It is obviously close to impossible to get far higher than that, which highlights how academically strong the university is.

As members have said, Edinburgh’s score this year was no flash in the pan. I could find rankings dating back only to 2007, but they paint a pretty useful picture. Edinburgh was 23rd in the rankings in 2007, but it subsequently moved up to 20th, then 21st and is now 17th on the planet this year. The university’s scores increased steadily over that time from 88.8 to 91.3. It is clearly doing well across all areas and has moved steadily and firmly up the rankings table over the past six or seven years.

At a presentation that the university gave recently, we heard about the excellent work that the university does in relation to renewables and the bioquarter, and how it helps to cement a global reputation not just for Edinburgh but for Scotland as a whole. We heard also about the competitive research grants, in relation to which the university had a record year.

Of course, the university has a very important place in the wider economy of Edinburgh and, indeed, Scotland. The University of Edinburgh is the third-largest employer in Edinburgh, with well over 8,000 full-time equivalent jobs—I think that there are in fact 12,000 staff—and it adds well over £1 billion to the Scottish economy. It is estimated that the university supports around 23,000 jobs. Of course, it is also a big factor for many inward investors who come to Scotland. Moreover, it is reckoned that the tourism aspect alone of the University of Edinburgh is worth about £17 million.

The university’s commercial liaison unit, Edinburgh Research and Innovation, provided some particularly interesting figures at the recent presentation. One that really encapsulates what the University of Edinburgh is all about is that since 1969 the university has created more than 262 spin-out companies. That is an impressive figure in itself, but I was more captured by the fact that 81 per cent of those companies are still trading, and that 89 per cent of those are still in Scotland. Those are remarkable statistics from a remarkable department in a remarkable university. I look forward to finding out how the University of Edinburgh fares in the QS survey in 2014.