Nine prestigious professional postgraduate courses have been deprived of their quota of state bursaries in a move which could signal the end of direct Government support of top-level vocational training.
One course has been suspended and the future of others is threatened. Universities fear that the cuts will diminish the size of the British contingent on internationally-renowned courses and decrease the number of postgraduate students from underprivileged backgrounds.
The Department for Education is withdrawing support from the Cardiff and City journalism courses, diplomas in museum studies at Leicester and Manchester, the diploma in vocational techniques for career linguists, Surrey's diploma in tourism management, and the translation courses at Bath, Bradford and Westminster. These courses attracted 110 state bursaries last year, 17 per cent of the total number of awards.
Bath, most of whose students relied on state funding, has been forced to suspend its translation diploma. Postgraduate director Mike Croft said: "We just can't justify it on economic grounds."
A cross-party delegation of MPs is meeting Tim Boswell, junior education minister, on March 30 in a last-ditch effort to overturn the decision.
Brian Winston, director of Cardiff's journalism school, which has admitted 14 bursary-holders a year since 1970, said the DFE's decision was "a disaster" which failed to take account of Cardiff's success rate in producing employable students.
He predicted a narrowing of the social base: "We are getting an increasingly south-east, increasingly privileged, increasingly white group of students. It's what I call the 'Lucinda problem'." There was a danger that the diploma would become an extension course for students from "fancy universities". The DFE told universities that students, as the ultimate beneficiaries, should invest in professional courses.