The newer civic universities.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 707.

The campus universities.

These are purpose-built institutions located in the countryside but close to towns. Examples are East Anglia, Lancaster, Sussex and Warwick. They have accomodation for most of their students on site and from their beginning, mostly in the early 1960s, attracted students from all over the country. (Many were known as centres of student protest in the late 1960s and early 1970s). They tend to emphasize relatively "new" academic disciplines such as social sciences and to make greater use than other universities of teaching in small groups, often known as “seminars”.

These were originally technical colleges set up by local authorities in the first 60 years of the XX century. Their upgrading to university status took place in 2 waves. The first wave occurred in the mid 1960s, when ten of them (for example, Aston in Birmingham, Salford near Manchester and Strathclyde in Glasgow) were promoted in this way. Then, in the early 1970s, another 30 became ''polytechnics" which meant that as well as continuing with their former courses, they were allowed to teach degree courses (the degrees being awarded by national body). In the early 1990s most of these (and also some other colleges) became universities. Their most notable feature is flexibility with regard to studying arrangements, including "sandwich" courses (i.e. studies interrupted by periods of time outside education ). They are now all financed by central government.