(Sorry)

The Sunday Telegraph - It’s exam time for Britain’s dons - and they’re failing, badly. By Niall Ferguson

Now, I don’t claim to be the perfect Prof. There have been times, I admit, when I’ve been late in returning essays; times when I’ve been late for meetings with students; times when I’ve missed deadlines for references. (As readers of The Da Vinci Code will know, Harvard professors have many responsibilities, such as thwarting the dastardly schemes of self-immolating religious fanatics.)

Chortle

There is a reason why expenditure on higher education in the US is close to 3 per cent of gross domestic product, while in England it is just 1 per cent. The reason is that private funding plays a far larger role in America. Harvard’s $26 billion endowment alone exceeds the assets of all UK universities combined - by a factor of roughly two. Oxford and Cambridge, the wealthiest of British universities, would rank roughly 15th in the US rich list if they were somehow relocated across the Atlantic.

Incroyable.

Harvard’s wealth today is in large measure a function of its independence. It is not that Harvard receives no money from government; a substantial proportion of the scientific research conducted by the university is funded by federal grants. But a larger share of its income comes from the returns on its huge endowment, now being managed by bond market guru Mohamed El-Erian.

Because they see that Harvard invests their money well, successful alumni do not hesitate to make generous benefactions. And because Harvard is independent, it can spend its income as it chooses. In Britain, with few exceptions, academic salaries are based on a nationwide age-related pay scale. In Harvard, each professor is paid precisely what the Dean of his Faculty or Professorial School thinks he or she is worth.

We had dinner Friday night with a friend of Peter’s that just got out of the Air Force (very nice for a Memorial Day Weekend, no? Though perhaps it would better have been Veterans Day…) and he was telling us how discouraging the pay grade system is. Funny, eh?

Ah, I hear you object, but what about those enormous fees? And it’s true that tuition and fees at Harvard currently total $32,097, so putting your pride and joy through a four-year degree course could set you back roughly £70,000. But - and here’s the key point - not if you cannot afford it. Because Harvard is rich, it can follow a “needs blind” admissions policy, based purely on academic criteria. If you get in and your family turns out to be poor, it is free. That cannot be claimed by any British institution. Oxford and Cambridge scholarships were long ago so eroded by inflation that they are now purely honorific.

I kept having to explain that to people when I was in London. There’s a very strange impression over there of what goes on over here.

The truly remarkable thing is that in this global market for brains, Britain is currently the Number 2 player after the US. More than one in 10 students at British universities are from abroad. Oxford and Cambridge are the only two European universities in the internationally recognised top 20 rankings produced by Jiao Tong University in Shanghai (all the rest, apart from Tokyo University, are in the US). That is pretty impressive for a state-run National Higher Education Service.

But the question is obviously this: What kind of signal does it send to an ambitious young Chinese student when British lecturers go on strike at examination time? Let me see… How about - in big red letters - “APPLY TO HARVARD”?

Heh.

Date: May 28th, 2006 · Comments RSS · Tags: People and Current Events