Students normally enter higher education (HE) from 18 onwards. All undergraduate education is largely state-financed (with Welsh students contributing £1,255), and students are generally entitled to student loans for maintenance. The state does not control syllabi, but it does influence admission procedures and monitors standards through the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales.
The typical first degree offered at Welsh universities is the Bachelor's degree, typically taking three years to complete full-time. Some institutions offer an undergraduate master's degree as a first degree, typically lasting four years. During a first degree students are known as undergraduates. Some universities offer a vocationally based Foundation degree, typically two years in length.
Within Wales, medical undergraduate education is provided by only Cardiff University, while graduate fast track route training is provided at Swansea University. In recent years there has been an increase in the number of universities with their own degree awarding powers owing to the change in the University of Wales from a single awarding body for most of the Universities in Wales to a confederal structure, along with former institutes gaining university status. In 2014/15, there were 8 HE institutions in Wales including one music conservatoire, the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff which is part of the University of Glamorgan Group. The University of Glamorgan, the second largest university in Wales, has never been a member of the University of Wales and awards its own degrees: the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama also awards University of Glamorgan degrees.
In 2014/15 there were 145,735 enrolments at HE institutions in Wales, including 97,900 first degree and other undergraduates and 27,780 postgraduates. Welsh HE institutions had a total of 10,140 full-time and part-time staff.
In 2012, the minister with responsibility for education within Wales, Leighton Andrews, made a significant statement in relation to the merger of Cardiff Metropolitan University (CMU, formerly UWIC), the University of Glamorgan and University of Wales, Newport (UWN), in which he proposed the dissolution of CMU and UN as part of the process towards merger. However significant such changes may seem, it is arguable that the effective imposition of an average undergraduate fee of £7.5 K pa for the three institutions (and others, but not to Cardiff, Swansea, Bangor and Aberystwyth all of whom will charge £9 K pa) will cause much more substantial long term damage to these universities and reinvent the 'binary divide' between universities and the former polytechnics and HE institutes.