Figures published by the admissions service Ucas show that a record 195,415 people are now eligible for clearing.

And 3,692 students have already secured a place through the system. Some of these will be Scottish students who gained their place after their results were published earlier this month.

The figure is down on last year, when around 4,000 youngsters had taken up a clearing place by this point, just a day after the publication of A-level results.

Clearing matches students who did not get the grades they needed, or who turned down offers or received none, to courses with vacancies.

Universities minister David Willetts yesterday suggested there will be 40,000 or more places in clearing this year.

But with 195,000 eligible for the process this could still mean that potentially, five students are fighting for every place.

Some students will now drop out and not enter clearing.

In total, 401,000 students have already had their university places confirmed, a rise of 7,500 on 2010, Ucas said.

And around 78,000 youngsters are still awaiting a decision from their chosen university.

The figures come as the head of Ucas Mary Curnock Cook said “lessons have been learned” from the debacle that saw a crucial website shut down yesterday.

The rush for clearing places was exacerbated when a fivefold increase in the number of visits to the Ucas Track website forced the site to close temporarily.

Tens of thousands of students were left in limbo when the service, which allows students to check if they have secured their university place, was shut down.

Ms Curnock Cook today told BBC News that the spike in visits, up to 644 a second at its peak, was down to users finding out the site had “soft-launched” and alerting their peers through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

“I think our lessons learned from yesterday was that just in the space of 12 months the way that young people communicate with each other using social media has changed out of all proportion,” she said.

BPP, which offers business and law degrees at 14 sites across the country, will become a university college with immediate effect.

The title is awarded to smaller higher education institutions that deliver a limited range of degrees and qualifications.

The move – approved by the universities minister, David Willetts – signals the government’s desire to expand the number of profit-making private sector institutions in higher education.

Willetts said it was “healthy to have a vibrant private sector working alongside our more traditional universities”. This would create a “dynamic and flexible” degree system and could encourage online degrees, he said.

BPP which intends to offer healthcare and teaching degrees in future, will not receive public funding and will be allowed to set its own fees.

An increase in private universities could reduce the pressure on university places. Figures published this month by the university admissions service, Ucas, revealed that about 170,000 people will miss out on a place at university in England this autumn, as applications surged by 11.6% – a record high.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/jul/26/first-private-university-30-years

The finding that there has been no progress in recruiting more talented disadvantaged students to Britain’s elite universities is terribly disappointing. However, the report by the Office for Fair Access (Offa) – the university admissions watchdog set up by the last government – comes up with some interesting reasons for the failure.

Often in the past, as demonstrated by Gordon Brown’s outburst over Oxford University’s refusal to admit the former comprehensive school pupil Laura Spence, universities have shouldered the blame for the heavily middle-class composition of our top universities. But today’s report shows that the picture is more complex and that much of the problem lies in the schools themselves. Too often, pupils are pushed into subjects at GCSE and A-level that make it difficult for them to win place at the likes of Oxford and Cambridge. This can be a result of the pressure from exam league tables as schools strive to improve their relative position.
The suggestion from Sir Martin Harris, director of Offa, is that there could be another method of ranking schools, such as showing the destination of its former pupils. Michael Gove, the new Education Secretary, signalled his interest in such a move in education debates during the election campaign, so there should be no difficulty in introducing such a measure. Yet, in itself, this would not get to the bottom of exactly what subjects universities value (and do not value) when determining admissions. Universities need to liaise more with teachers at schools in the most disadvantaged areas so they can inform their pupils of the options they should aim for if they wish to seek places at the most competitive universities.

Pupils should sit American-style university admissions tests to help tutors to discriminate between candidates, according to a review of examinations commissioned by the Tories.

The independent review, which says A levels are not fit for purpose, also recommends that universities be given a central role in designing the A-level syllabus to make it more rigorous and prepare pupils for a degree.

Sir Richard Sykes, former rector of Imperial College London, who chaired the 18-month review said the pre-university test would measure language, mathematics and reasoning skills.

“A university assessment test spans the entire population, irrespective of the subject that they are taking,” he said.