With the fact that the government and universities have now introduced extortionate tuition fees for their students, it is something of a worry that certain subjects may have even fewer people studying for them in the future. These are the subjects mainly connected with the sciences; even before the tuition fees shot up, take up numbers were far lower than the country needed.
Already, the government is starting to subsidise certain scientific subjects in a bid to attract more students. However, it is inevitable that much more will need to be done to entice anything like the number of people that are needed to fill the graduate jobs that are connected with these subjects.
Of course, over the past years, students have had a propensity to study the same type of subjects - law, business studies - the subjects that are totally over subscribed and really do not need any more students working toward them.
Some people argue that more can be done in the secondary schools to attempt to address this balance. Even the foreign languages are undersubscribed, as a consequence of the fact that it is no longer compulsory to study another language on the National Curriculum.
Admittedly, too many students have swamped our universities over the past couple of decades and with many of these graduating with mediocre honours degrees - this was never going to be of huge benefit to the country. We now need to encourage more students into the subjects that are most needed to keep the country going in the future.
