The University of Wales, Swansea was founded in 1920 as University College, Swansea, the fourth college of the University of Wales, following the report of the Haldane Commission into University Education in Wales. It is located on the north coast of Swansea Bay, east of the Gower Peninsula, just outside the city of Swansea - the second largest city in Wales. Swansea has recently adopted the public name of Swansea University and applied for its own degree awarding powers in 2001, although these have not yet been granted.
As of 2004, the university had over 10,300 students. In the past year, it has undergone major restructuring, expanding popular areas such as History, English and Computing but controversially closing the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Centre for Development Studies and the Department of Philosophy. The Department of Chemistry has also ceased to take undergraduate students, although it continues to carry out research and post-graduate teaching.
HRH The Prince of Wales (Chancellor of University of Wales)
The university campus is the closest university in the UK to a beach, located on the north coast of Swansea Bay, east of the Gower Peninsula, in the grounds of Singleton Park, just outside the city of Swansea — the second largest city in Wales.
SwanseaUniversity is in the process of building the new £50 million Institute of Life Sciences (ILS), with a new IBM Blue C computer (the fastest computer dedicated to the life sciences anywhere in the world) in the “Deep Computing Visualisation Centre for Medical Applications“.
The University was composed of colleges until 1996, when the University was reorganised with a two-tier structure of member institutions in order to absorb the Cardiff Institute of Higher Education (which became the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (UWIC)) and the Gwent College of Higher Education (which became University of Wales College, Newport (UWCN)).