"Bolton itself is a friendly, thriving town close to the big cities of Manchester and Liverpool. Our teaching quality has consistently won the highest ratings possible from the Government's quality control agency and we have professional accreditation for more than 30 of our teaching programmes. There are currently 192 Academic staff members of whom 130 hold PhD degrees. This represents 67.7% of PhD holders amongst the Academic staff." Education has been delivered on the site in Bolton since 1824 originally as Bolton Mechanics Institute. Over the last 186 years the institution went from strength to strength and after steadily improving its reputation Bolton Institute of Higher Education became the University of Bolton in 2005. The University still prides itself on a very strong Engineering department with many courses including BSc (Hons) Civil Engineering achieving high rankings in numerous areas. The University now also offers a full range of courses within the fields of Business, Law, Computing, Science, Art, Design and of course Engineering.