A Chinese economist once asked me to explain British universities. “Why do you take your young,” he said, “at their most creative age, lock them in a monastery for three years and make them drunk?” Each August I recall this question when hundreds of thousands of British teenagers scramble to enter university. They must perform utterly archaic feats of memory in their exams and then embark on an academic experience that has almost nothing to do with real life. Their reward may be a higher income, but perhaps not higher than their innate ability would have gained them anyway.

England’s present university system is in a terrible mess, chronically in need of a royal commission. Between 1997 and 2010, university student numbers increased by 68%. Then, under the coalition government, universities were offered £9,000 a year for each of an unlimited number of students. It was an open invitation to lower standards and increase overcrowding.

Some cities found themselves with two if not three universities, with multiple campuses, student residences and overheads to match. The waste was ludicrous. Their vice-chancellors received crazy sums. The average for the Russell group is now £400,000.

The government supposedly recouped the cost of all this by treating fees and maintenance grants as borrowed. This allowed university extravagance to appear not as public spending but as debt, on the thesis that the students would repay it with interest one day. Until recently

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