Oxford and Cambridge

An air of impending doom is pervading the senior common rooms of Britain’s top two universities. The reason is that the government seems intent on removing the extra funding, of around £ 1, 700 a year for each student, paid to the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge to help them to maintain their centuries-long tradition of personal tuition, their well-stocked libraries and their air of scholarly community. The universities say that, without these extra fees, which provide around 5% of their total income, they would have to either give up trying to stay in the world's premier league of higher education or start charging entry fees to their students.

The government has asked the Higher Education Funding Council for England to report by early next month on whether there is any justification for these college grants, which cost the taxpayer around £ 35m a year. But some ministers seem to have already made their minds up: at the Labors Party conference, Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, complained that half of the places at Oxford and Cambridge went to pupils from private schools even though these educate only 7% of British children.

The two universities feel they can mount a stout defence of their extra funding. Britain needs to have world-class universities. So, Oxford and Cambridge argue, their teaching costs should be compared with those of, say, Harvard and Stanford universities, not Luton and Bournemouth. Cambridge says that an engineering undergraduate at Harvard pays annual tuition fees of about $22, 000, whereas the tuition cost of a Cambridge engineer is around £ 7, 100 ($ 11, 500).

Certainly, assessments of the teaching at Oxford and Cambridge, conducted by the government's funding agen­cy, support their claims of superior guality. But the case for retaining the college fees would be bolstered if a wider audit of the college system were to be carried out. It could consider, for example, whether having a separate administration for each of Oxford's 45 and Cambridge's 27 colleges imposes extra costs. Do other universities deliver the same quality of education without the luxury of individual coaching? Neither university has commissioned such an audit - which is why it would be wise for the government to do so before deciding on the future of their funding.

What would Oxford and Cambridge do if they lost their extra funding? They have considerable assets: Oxford and its colleges are estimated to have investments worth about £ 1 billion, and Cambridge around £ 800 millions. But they are already using the income from these endowments to help cover their costs. They could try to raise more money from private donors, but America (whose universities are more successful at this) has a tax system more favorable to such donations, and more mil­lionaires.

• Even allowing for the fact that some of the fees at Ame­rica's top universities are used to subsidise research, Cambridge argues that more is spend on educating America's top engineers than on Britain's.

• He said it was time to " modernise" the higher-education system, " by redistributing resources".

• Their strongest card is that the college grants deliver a standard of tuition that is the envy of universities worldwide.

• Running down these investments to cover the loss of college fees would not be prudent, and is illegal under charity law.

• If so, do the benefits, such as the sense of community created by self-governing colleges, outweigh these?

Ответьте на вопросы к тексту:

1. What are two main British universities?

2. What does the fee help them to do?

3. How much does a Harvard postgraduate pay in comparison with a Cambridge one?

4. What would Oxford and Cambridge do if they lost their extra funding?