10,000 extra university places on offer

Currently the 10,000 extra Uni places are bring promoted as part of the governments response to the pressures that people believe we will experience when Clearing comes around. However the fact that the Unis will not be getting any teaching grant will have an interesting effect on who will actually be offering such places. On the one hand those universities who traditionally recruit students through clearing might well feel this could help them, whilst those who recruit fewer, if any, students via this route might feel less inclined. Obviously this has not escaped the notice of business people http://preview.tinyurl.com/FT10000Places. The real issue is that these places will only be for STEM courses, (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths), so these are not the courses that are usually oversubscribed anyway. It will be interesting to see what effect this new initiative has as we go into Clearing this year.