Why Did England Have So Few Universities — While Scotland Thrived?
Why access shaped education and innovation
There’s a really strange gap in English universities when you actually look at it properly. For centuries, higher education in Britain, especially in England, was dominated by just two institutions, University of Oxford, founded around 1096, and University of Cambridge in 1209. And then nothing. The next English university didn't appear until Durham University in 1832. That’s a gap of around 600 years from Cambridge, and even longer from Oxford.
What makes that even more surprising is what’s happening at the same time in Scotland. Quietly, without the same level of attention, Scotland builds a completely different system. You get University of St Andrews in 1413, University of Glasgow in 1451, University of Aberdeen in 1495, and University of Edinburgh in 1582. By the late 18th century, Scotland had twice as many universities as England, despite being smaller, poorer, and having a much lower population.
That contrast is what really sparked my curiosity. I realised how old Glasgow is, and when I looked into the oldest universities in the UK, I was genuinely surprised. For a long time, there were only six universities in total, and four of them were in Scotland. To me, that immediately feels like something is off. If England had more resources, more people, and more power, then why didn’t that translate into more institutions? You’d expect output to scale with input, but here it clearly doesn’t.
So what actually caused this?
Part of it comes down to the Wars of Scottish Independence. Before that period, Scottish students often went to England to study. But once the wars broke out, that pathway was disrupted. Instead of relying on English institutions, Scotland had to build its own. And I think this is where it starts to get interesting, because when a system is forced to rebuild itself, it often becomes more intentional. It’s not just copying what already exists, it’s responding to a real constraint. In a way, Scotland didn’t just build universities, it designed a different model of what a university could be.
What’s more surprising is that England didn’t lack the ability to build universities. It had the money, the population, the resources. It just didn’t. And that’s where the Stamford Oath comes in. Introduced in 1334, it required graduates from Oxford and Cambridge to promise not to teach anywhere else. That one decision effectively locked higher education into two places. It created a closed system, where all talent was funnelled into the same institutions, and nothing new could realistically emerge.
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To me, this feels like a classic example of over-controlling a system to the point where it stops evolving. To me it’s almost like designing something to be perfect and then never allowing it to change. It might work in the short term, but over time it becomes rigid, and that rigidity starts to limit progress. You can see that here, because for hundreds of years, nothing has changed.
Then the oath was abolished in 1827, and almost immediately new universities started appearing. Durham University, University College London, King’s College London, and the University of London all emerged within a very short period. That moment is quite telling. It shows that the issue was never capability, it was a constraint. As soon as the constraint is removed, the system expands naturally. That, to me, is a strong indicator of a poorly designed system rather than a lack of resources.
Religion was another major barrier layered on top of this. To study at Oxford or Cambridge, students had to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. That excluded nonconformists, Catholics, and a large part of the growing middle class. At the exact moment England is industrialising and evolving economically, a huge portion of its population can’t access higher education.
Looking at that now, it feels completely counterintuitive. You have a society that’s growing and becoming more complex, but the system designed to develop people is closed off to most of them. It’s almost like building something that deliberately ignores a large percentage of its users. You wouldn’t expect that to succeed long term, and in this case, it arguably slowed down progress.
That’s why University College London is so interesting. It was founded specifically to be non-religious and open to those excluded elsewhere. It wasn’t just another university, it was a direct response to a flawed system. In a way, it feels less like an addition and more like a correction. It challenges the idea of who education is actually for.
At the same time, Scottish universities were operating in a completely different way. While English institutions were restrictive, Scotland leaned towards accessibility. Universities were more affordable, more socially diverse, and less dependent on elite backgrounds or strict religious alignment. That openness changes how ideas move. When more people can participate, ideas spread faster and combine in more interesting ways.
And this is where I think Scotland really stands out. It wasn’t just doing more, it was doing things differently. It feels like the system was designed with use in mind rather than status. By the 18th century, the University of Edinburgh had one of the leading medical schools in Europe. Scottish universities became closely tied to Enlightenment thinking, and education was connected to real-world application rather than just tradition.
For me, this became even more interesting when looking specifically at the University of Glasgow. It wasn’t just old, it was active in shaping major ideas. Adam Smith studied and later taught there, and his work became The Wealth of Nations, which laid the foundation for modern economics. Francis Hutcheson helped spark the Scottish Enlightenment and even chose to lecture in English instead of Latin, which at the time was a radical move but made ideas far more accessible.
Then you have James Watt, who developed his improved steam engine at the university, directly contributing to the Industrial Revolution. When you look at all of this together, it becomes clear that these universities weren’t just institutions, they were environments that enabled ideas to happen.
And it’s not just Scotland either. Across Europe, universities were growing rapidly. Italy, France, and Central Europe were all building institutions during this period. Over a hundred universities appeared while England still had only two. That flips the narrative completely. Scotland wasn’t unusual for having multiple universities. England was unusual for not having them.
So the bigger idea here isn’t just about universities. It’s about systems. England’s model was centralised, exclusive, and controlled. Scotland’s, and much of Europe’s, was more distributed, accessible, which tended to evolve faster. They allow more input, more variation, and more unexpected outcomes.
That’s why Scotland was able to play such a key role in the Enlightenment and in shaping modern economics, engineering, and medicine. It consistently produced ideas that had global impact, even without the same level of resources or power.
And that’s the part that stands out the most to me. For centuries, England had the population, the wealth, and the infrastructure. But Scotland had something that arguably mattered more. It had access.
And I think that’s the key takeaway. If you design a system that controls who gets to participate, you limit what that system can become. But if you design for access, even if you have fewer resources, the outcomes can be far greater.
Over time, access to ideas will always outperform control over them.