Until the early 1980s, elite higher education was the norm in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Universities that were established in the UK after the publication of the Robbins Report in the 1960s are called “plate glass universities”, as are all the former polytechnics and higher education institutions that were granted university status under the Further and Higher Education Act, which was enacted by John Major-s government in 1992. Raising tuition fees by the UK government in much the same way as US universities initially attracted international attention, but eventually society began to accept the policy and consider it a rational decision. Higher tuition strategies can be coupled with need-blind admissions and aggressive financial aid, or at least the availability of subsidized loans. In some ways, the higher education movement in the UK since the 1980s is an adoption of the American way of higher education.