Government warned over HE places
The Higher Education Policy Institute has warned that a quarter of a million new undergraduate places will be needed by 2010, a rise of over 60%.
It warns the Government that population growth and more students taking A Levels may result in a shortage of places.
A paper by the think tank’s senior researcher Libby Aston said that although demand rose little during the 1990s, future demand is ‘extremely difficult to predict’. The majority of those chasing places are expected to be from middle-class homes.
The Government is expected to make extra places available only on its new two-year vocational foundation degrees instead of traditional three-year courses. However Ms Aston was concerned by this.
‘By constraining supply to a particular form of provision, in the absence of student demand for that provision, might be tantamount to refusing… places to well qualified applicants,’ she explained.
There are currently about 1.33 million undergraduates in England.
