Leading universities will be forced to take fixed quotas of students from state schools in exchange for the power to charge tuition fees of £9,000, under Coalition plans.
Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, ordered a government watchdog to "focus more sharply" on institutions, such as Oxford and Cambridge, that have struggled to increase the proportion of places they give to working-class candidates.
He told Sir Martin Harris, the Director of Fair Access, to set targets for individual universities and said they could include benchmarks for "the percentage of students admitted from state schools or colleges".
Any university that failed to do enough to meet its targets could be stripped of the power to charge fees above the basic level of £6,000. Serious breaches of an agreement between Sir Martin and a university could see institutions fined up to £500,000, the minister said.
Private school head teachers condemned the proposed measure as...
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Wednesday 16 February 2011
Wednesday 19 January 2011
Students turning to two-year foundation degrees
The number of undergraduates gaining “foundation” degrees soared by almost a third last year, it was revealed.
Figures showed 24,865 students completed a short degree course in 2010 compared with 18,850 in 2009 and just 9,275 five years ago.
The disclosure suggests that students are increasingly seeing foundation degrees – which take two years to complete and combine academic study with work-based tuition – as a cheaper alternative to traditional undergraduate courses.
Many students also favour them because they can often lead directly to a job.
It follows claims from David Willets, the Universities Minister, that growing numbers of young people should seek alternatives to...
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