Nearly one in five degree courses has been scrapped since the tripling of tuition fees to ￡9,000-a-year, it has been revealed.

Universities are concentrating on popular subjects and dropping courses that have too few applicants or are too expensive to run.

Official figures show acull of more than 2,600 in the number of courses available to applicants planning to start their degrees in 2013.

More than 5,200 courses had already been removed for students beginning this year - the first cohort to face the higher fees.

Universities dumped some of the courses even after prospectuses went online earlier this year and in some cases after applications began, according to reports yesterday.

News of the closures come as UCAS figures published last week showed that the number of students in England applying for university places in 2013 has plunged by almost 10 percent already.

Numbers of EU and non-EU students applicants have also dropped.

The scrapped courses range from archeology at Birmingham to languages at Salford and London Metropolitan.

Birmingham had announced six weeks ago that single honours archeology would no longer be offered because ‘it has proved unable to attract sufficient applicants of the appropriate quality’.

The number of courses listed by UCAS has fallen from 43,360 to 35,501 in two years.

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, said: ‘The UK’s global academic reputation is built on the broad range of subjects.

‘While government rhetoric is about students as consumers, the choices have narrowed.’

(Read by Brian Salter. Brian Salter is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)

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(Agencies)