Pen's Nest

Our universities are all public, as far as I know - at least, I've not heard of any private ones. At any rate, anyone can apply to any of them, and the criteria for getting into one are academic rather than, say, financial. They're not all of one sort, but the distinctions are different from yours!

When I was at university at the end of the 1970s, there were:

- Oxbridge (ie Oxford and Cambridge) and a handful of other very venerable institutions, like Durham and some of the Scottish universities

- 'redbrick' universities like Birmingham, built by philanthropic Victorians

- 'new' universities, generally speaking built in the 1960s.

There were also Polytechnics, as mentioned above, which were intended to provide tertiary education of a more practical, industry-aimed nature. Students still got degrees, but they weren't quite as highly regarded as university degrees. Though the teaching in polys was often rather better than at universities!

These days, polytechnics are now called universities, as are some other educational institutes here and there - there's something that used to be a Business School not far from here, it's now a University, except that by the old definitions, it's nothing of the kind. Very confusing for those school-leavers who are the first generation of their families to try to go to college after leaving school.