Science places protected in undergraduate market reforms

Places for science and engineering students are to be protected in the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s formula for allocating undergraduate student numbers to English universities, published on 17 October.

Places for these and other “strategically important and vulnerable subjects”, such as modern languages and quantitative social science, will be excluded from the levy on student numbers being put in place to free up 20,000 places for competition between universities charging under £7,500 a year in tuition fees.