The university's origins can be traced back to a private School of Art founded in 1856, which eventually became the Southampton College of Art. Mergers with the Southampton College of Technology, and later the College of Nautical Studies at Warsash, led to the establishment of the Southampton Institute of Higher Education in 1984.
Southampton Institute became a university on 12 July 2005, adopting the name Southampton Solent University on 15 August 2005. Prior to 2005, Southampton Institute provided assistance to Nottingham Trent University in its provision of business-focused degrees, relating to accountancy, finance, and professional ACCA qualifications. Some Nottingham Trent University certificates included Southampton Institute/Solent University stamps to indicate this agreement. In 2015 the University came to an agreement with New College of the Humanities, London whereby it will validate some of their degrees. In November 2017, the Privy Council approved the change of name of Southampton Solent University to Solent University, with effect from 2018.
We are dedicated to the pursuit of university education that enables learners from all backgrounds to become enterprising citizens and responsible leaders. We are committed to promoting economic and social prosperity for the communities we serve.
Put simply - we want Solent graduates to be the passionate, creative professionals of the future, bringing expertise and energy into their communities and workplaces.
2016/17 leavers were the last to be surveyed by the DHLE. The DHLE survey has been replaced by the Graduate Outcomes survey with leavers surveyed 15 months after graduation. Therefore, there will be no results released in 2019. The results for the first Graduate Outcomes survey will be available in Spring 2020.
In January 2017 we became part of the QS World University Rankings. Launched in 2010, the rankings highlight over 900 of the top universities in the world and aim to help prospective students make informed comparisons of leading universities based on a number of comparative areas, including teaching, employability, research, internationalization, learning environment and facilities.
In 2015 the University won the Most Improved Student Experience Award at the Times Higher Education Awards. The award is based on student votes from the Time Higher Education's Student Experience Survey, where up to 20,000 students are polled by a specialist student market research agency to rate academic reputation, teaching, social life and facilities of their universities.
