Students face intense competition for fewer places
Tens of thousands of students will face a desperate scramble for university places today as increasingly well-qualified school leavers compete for vacancies. Competition for the remaining vacancies is expected to be particularly intense this year as another record year for A-level results will see students compete for slightly fewer places this year. On the stroke of midnight last night 37,398 vacancies went up for grabs through clearing, the service which matches students with university places. This is 300 fewer than last year when 37,700 places were on offer.
The Independent
Don angers students with nostalgia for 'pawing' pedagogues
A female professor's hankering for an age when seminars were enlivened by the sexual frisson between dons and students has enraged the National Union of Students. Mary Beard, 51, a professor of classics at Cambridge University, made her remarks as she criticised colleagues for failing to record in their writings about the life and work of a late Oxford don that he was a notorious "serial groper".
Daily Telegraph , Daily Mail , Times Higher Education Supplement (August 18)
Universities under pressure to cut tuition fees
Universities will face pressure to cut tuition fees in a summer sale to fill empty places on degree courses, academics said last night. Results for A-level examinations, released today, will trigger the annual clearing exercise to match students without places to available vacancies at universities. But the increase in annual tuition fees to £ 3,000 next month, and a decline of more than 17,000 in applications this year, is leading to fears that some universities will be unable to attract enough students to avoid cuts in government funding.
The Times
Diplomas usher in a brave new world of training
AS 500,000 students discover their AS- and A-level results today, their future employers are working behind the scenes on an entirely new range of qualifications. The content of five of the Government's new special diplomas, the most difficult the equivalent of three A-levels, was agreed by employers three weeks ago and now schools, colleges, universities and the examination bodies are working to transform them into workable curricula that will appeal to parents, students and employers.
Daily Telegraph , Financial Times , The Independent
Social networking website joins battle to target freshers
A social networking website aimed at A-level students preparing to go to university launches today in a sign of growing competition within the market. Univillage.com is the first such site catering solely for UK students who will be able to join only if they have a recognised university e-mail address. It will target school leavers with an e-mail campaign even before they arrive for freshers' week in an attempt to steal a march on facebook.com, the US site that is expanding rapidly in Britain.
Financial Times
The brain genes that gave man a head start on chimpanzees
Scientists have identified perhaps the most crucial genetic region that makes us human. By comparing human DNA with that of chimpanzees and other animals they have found the region of the genome subjected to the strongest natural selection since we shared a common ancestor with chimps. The 108-letter stretch of DNA contains two genes that appear to control brain development. The researchers speculate that the blistering pace of evolution indicates that they may have been crucial in the rapid increase in brain size and complexity that occurred in the human lineage.
The Guardian , The Independent
Historians express unease over pardons
The decision by the Defence Secretary Des Browne to seek a blanket pardon for 306 men shot for battlefield offences during the Great War was greeted with unease by many historians and experts yesterday. "In one sense it is justified because we know a lot more about the psychological effects of war now than we did then and it would have been treated differently if they had had that information,'' said Sir Lawrence Freedman, professor of war studies at King's College, London. "But you do have to put it into the context of generals having to persuade large numbers of men to take extraordinary risks and in that context what was done would not constitute unreasonable action.''
Daily Telegraph
Ancient whale 'was T-rex of the oceans'
A fossil of a sea mammal with massive, razor-sharp teeth that roamed the waters off southern Australia about 25 million years ago has been found embedded in a rock on a beach in Victoria. Only its snout and parts of one eye socket could be seen, protruding from a boulder, when it was spotted by a teenager, Stuamn Hunder, on Jan Juc beach. The rest of the skull was embedded in the rock. The work of prising it out fell to Erich Fitzgerald, a 25-year-old PhD student at Monash University, in Melbourne. Mr Fitzgerald - who calls the creature "Australia's very own T-rex of the oceans" - spent three years on the project, and the skull went on display yesterday at the Melbourne Museum.
The Independent
Letter
Renaissance of science will follow that of mathematics.
Financial Times
Letters
No wonder science is seen as uncool.
Why we need animal research.
The Independent