A super-quick guide to the Scottish Universities
I grew up in Scotland, studied at Edinburgh and then worked at Stirling for the first phase of my career. I absolutely loved my time at university, and it’s safe to say that I am a big fan of Scottish education. But is it really all that special? Is there really anything that sets Scottish universities apart from others in the UK?
Well, there are certainly some differences, but whether they are special, depends on you and what you are looking for.
Building on the approach that I took a couple of weeks ago, looking at similarities between universities based on a bit of history, I thought it would be interesting to look at the Scottish universities in three quite distinct groups:
1. The four ‘ancient’ universities
Scotland’s oldest universities, University of St. Andrews, University of Glasgow, University of Aberdeen and University of Edinburgh all date back to the 15th and 16th centuries. St. Andrews, established first in 1413, and Edinburgh last in 1583. But be under no illusion, the universities of today bear little resemblance to their mediaeval incarnations, with more than ten thousand students studying at the smallest of these (St. Andrews), and just shy of 50,000 at the largest (Edinburgh).
They do all continue to teach the traditional university subjects, such as sciences, arts and humanities, medicine, law and divinity, but they also teach and research the most modern of disciplines; frequently ahead of their time. Edinburgh, for example has been a leading light in AI for over 50 years now.
They each have some rather wonderful old buildings, from Edinburgh’s Old College, where I studied Law, to Aberdeen’s stunning King’s College Chapel, and Glasgow’s iconic Gilbert Scott Building. Of these, however, only King’s College dates back to anywhere near the date of the university’s establishment.
Where they are distinctive, however, is in their approach to teaching. Unless you are studying one of the professions, such as Medicine, Law or Divinity, you’ll find you enter into not just a course, but a faculty, and you’ll be studying for four years, not just three like elsewhere in the UK.
In your first two years, you’ll take the required courses for the degree you’ve chosen, plus a range of other subjects from your faculty which may, or may not be related. What this gives you is real flexibility to change your mind. At the end of the first year you’ll typically be able to choose from several different single honours degrees, or potentially combine the subjects you have taken into a joint degree.
This makes these universities absolutely ideal if you know the general area you want to study, but not the exact subject.
2. The ‘sixties’ universities
University of Dundee, University of Strathclyde, Heriot Watt University and University of Stirling were all given university status in the 1960s. But they are far from alike.
Dundee, you see, was previously a college of St. Andrews University, and dates back to 1881. It is, in most ways, much more similar to the four ancient universities than it is to any other. It teaches the same range of academic and professional courses, and has the same faculty system as the other four, and just like them, it has a city centre location.
Strathclyde and Heriot-Watt, on the other hand, both had histories as colleges of science and technology, dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries respectively. While they both now teach a far broader range of subjects, both would pride themselves on taking a rather more applied approach than their ancient rivals. And while they still offer a wider degree of flexibility within their degrees than you might find elsewhere in the UK, they do not operate the full flexibility of the traditional faculty entry system.
Note that location-wise they couldn’t be more different, with Strathclyde's concentrated city-centre campus located flat-bang in the middle of Glasgow, and Heriot-Watt’s main 380 acre greenfield site located around 7 miles south-west of Edinburgh's city centre.
Stirling, meanwhile, was established brand new in 1967. Unencumbered by the baggage of history, they chose to take the flexible learning system to the extreme, bringing together elements of the US university education system with the Scottish approach. They adopted a semester system right from the start, and give admission to the whole university.
You can literally take Biology alongside Business Studies and English Literature in your first year and choose later which to concentrate on. And then there is that campus. The sixties architecture may not be to everyone’s taste, but the setting in the grounds of the 18th century Airthrey Castle with the backdrop of the Ochil Hills is second to none.
3. The ‘new’ universities
Just like in England, in 1992 five polytechnics and colleges of technology became universities: Edinburgh Napier University, Glasgow Caledonian University, The Robert Gordon University Aberdeen, Abertay Dundee and the University of Paisley.
Paisley subsequently underwent a number of mergers and is now known as the University of the West of Scotland.
As with their English counterparts, each of these urban universities offers a wide range of more practical and vocational degrees, typically including business, engineering and health, with more creative disciplines offered at some.
Like Strathclyde and Heriot-Watt, they don’t offer the fully flexible study approach, though once again, the four year degree allows for considerable breadth and depth of study.
1992 also saw the establishment of the University of the Highlands and Islands project. It brought together 12 colleges and research institutes across the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, bringing university-level education closer to hundreds of small town and rural communities where previously there had been none. It finally gained university status in 2011.
And again in 1992 Queen Margaret College (Edinburgh) was granted degree awarding powers. This small specialist institution focuses on health, education, business, media and performance, and became a full university, Queen Margaret University, in 2012.
For completeness sake, I should also mention that Glasgow School of Art, unlike the other art schools, remains an independent higher education institution, as does the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC).
And that’s it! Your super-quick guide to Scottish universities!
For those of you in Scotland, I know you’ve already heard of all of these institutions, but perhaps a little bit of history has helped you see them in a different light.
For the rest of you, I hope this has helped demystify education in Scotland, and pointed you in the direction of one or two universities that might be the right fit for you.
