Recently, the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, professor Andrew Hamilton, said the he should be able to charge more for tuition and pointed out that it costs £16,000 a year to educate a student at the university.

£16,000? That’s $24,000. If it costs the latter to educate a student at Oxford, which still provides small group tutorials, why does it cost more than double that to give an American student a similar education?

The cost of higher education in the US has become a public scandal. Heads of universities are paying themselves like the CEOs of major public companies. To attract students, universities have over-built with facilities that cannot be used for anything else. Moreover, instead of appealing to prospective students with the rigor and excellence of the tuition, grade inflation has left employers wondering what degrees mean from universities which in the past had great reputations. Competition, featuring up-to-the-minute sporting facilities and science labs, is all very well, but it is putting private higher education out of the reach of far too many people. It is thus a bubble that will burst when universities have mined all the likely candidates for admission and can find no more.

And all this is presided over by the so-called intelligentsia! Reminds one of the bankers.