Yesterday’s announcement that student number controls are to be abolished has attracted comment from all quarters. Here is a round-up of responses:
Steve Egan, interim chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, said that the removal of the student numbers cap “will give more people the opportunity to benefit from higher education” and welcomed “additional support for STEM [science, technology, engineering and maths] subjects, which will help universities and colleges to capitalise on the upturn in demand in these areas and support economic growth”. He added that Hefce “looks forward to further details from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in due course”. More...

By Jack Grove. More students are seeking help from university counsellors amid growing concerns over debt and future job prospects.
Demand for psychological support services on campus has risen by 16 per cent over the past three years, according to a poll of about a third of all university counsellors undertaken by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, published on 6 December. More...

By John Morgan. The plan to fund extra student places by selling the student loan book is “nonsense” in economic terms, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
The highly respected IFS today delivered a stinging verdict on the financing behind the government’s move to abolish the cap on student numbers, announced by the chancellor, George Osborne, in his autumn statement yesterday. More...

By Paul Jump. UK research has higher citation impact than that of any comparator nation, a report commissioned by the government has revealed.
The report, published on 6 December, says that the average number of citations garnered by UK papers relative to the world average in their field – which is often used as a measure of quality - has been higher than that of papers from any other nation since 2008, and the gap is growing.
Produced by Elsevier and commissioned by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, it also shows that, by 2012, the citation impact of the nation typically regarded as producing the highest quality science, the US, had slipped behind Canada and was on a par with that of Germany and Italy. More...