Students 20,375 – undergraduates 11,155, postgraduates 9,220. Around 100 undergraduate courses and 57 taught postgraduate courses across eight schools.
A public university spread over three campuses – two in the city of Drech and one in Placemouth, 40 minutes away – with a new city-centre campus opened in 2024 in a former Debenhams department store. The university is the successor of a large number of merged, renamed and reformed institutions of further and higher education across nearly two centuries – a Mechanics’ Institute founded in 1834 on the civic side, and a Training College established in 1847 by the Reverend Francis Close on the church side.
Drech is a professional formation university – nursing, allied health, teaching, social work, business and computing dominate, the majority of undergraduates are the first in their family to go to university, and the unusually large postgraduate population is mostly taught, mostly online or blended, and mostly balancing study with work and caring. A significant slice of provision is delivered with partners – a franchised business school in the city centre, a transnational campus in South East Asia, and a fast-growing apprenticeship portfolio the university regards as its biggest opportunity.
The books balance – just – on a thin surplus that depends on one large international pathway partnership and on estates consolidation nobody will confirm the detail of. Meanwhile the further education college that shares the Placemouth campus and feeds Drech most of its articulating students has entered merger talks after its own finances collapsed, and students mid-way through franchised and articulated courses are writing to the SA asking what happens to them if it folds.