27th June 2011, 08:53 PM
Quote:If, as seems likely, this results in a reduction in student numbers, we may start to see a related reduction in fees to up the numbers and keep academic staff in jobs. They'll need to look at balancing individual charge-per-head against total income per course to see what offers the bes tresult in terms of revenue. It's unlikely that many places will be able to fill their full quota for archaeology students at ?9000 per year, so a situation may arise where there's a degree (excuse the pun) of competitive discounting.The most likely outcome of that scenario, is that archaeology courses will be axed in favour of expanding existing subjects which are "easy" to fill with top-whack fee paying students. Uni bean-counters are looking for ways to shed academic staff, not keep them. So overall, there will be fewer untrained archaeology graduates to muddy the waters of the commercial sector, which sounds like it'll make life easier for all concerned.