Universities in the UK

Between 20 th century and 21th century, British university has been changing a lot. The number of professors got bigger, and the number of students also got bigger at the same time. In addition to traditional courses, a lot of new majors increased. Besides As the consequence introducing American way, result-oriented method, professors have gotten more motivated for education. At first I think you would imagine Oxbridge (Oxford and Cambridge) as British university. Both universities are prestigious and have some Nobel Prize winners.Each university in the UK is called ancient university, red brick university, or plate glass university and so on according to what university's building is made by.

Ancient Universities
Oxbridge and four universities in Scottoland (University of St Andrews, University of Glasgow, University of Aberdeen, and University of Edinburgh) have more than 500 years history. The buildings of these universities are mainly made up of limestone. The University of Oxford is the olderst university in the UK, which was established in 11th century. As of 2008, 47 nobel prise winners, 25 prime ministers, 6 kings, over 50 Olympic medalists graduated from Oxford.




Red Brick Universities
Relatively new universities which established mainly between late 19 th century and mid 20 th century are often called “Red Brick University”. The reason why they are called that is because buildings are made of red brick. The person who mentioned this word, red brick university, at first is Edgar Allison Peers, who was a professor teaching Spanish in University of Liverpool. He called these six universities;University of Manchester, University of Liverpool, University of Birmingham, University of Leeds, University of Sheffield, and University of Bristol as red brick universities.

Plate Glass Universities
Since 1960s, a lot of universities were founded in the UK based on "The Robbins Report", which called for expansion of universities. As the result, nearly twenty new universities were established. Since they are constructed by steel and plate glasses which are put in concrete frames, they started to be called plate glass university.
For example, University of East Anglia, University of York, and University of Essex are called plate glass university.

Reference
Deguchi, Yasuo. Kobayashi, Akio. Saitou, Takako. The 21st Century Encyclopeadia of British Culture. Tokyo: Tokyo shoseki, 2009.