UK Universities Face 'Irreversible Decline', Global League Table Suggests

Like many recipients of a free tertiary education in the 1970s and early 1980s before the Australian insanity was imported to the UK, (the UK fee model was based on the Australian model AFAIK) I find myself in a strange place: I think it was better when it was free, but I also think it was better when less people went to university.

Australian universities bring about $17b of revenue into the country selling degrees to overseas students. It's an amazingly successful model but one which has probably broken the value chain between institute and student, by commercialising it. Its a factory. And it's hard to fail fee paying students.

The prior model was called the Colombo plan, and was a conscious political interventionist approach to building social capital in emerging economies, by training professionals to go back home and "love australia" -And I know some who did, and do. Like a lot of things, you can't buy this outcome. People sold degrees win individually, but their home economy usually suffers except from remittance money. People gifted degrees and sent home become senior civil servants, leaders in their home economy, and informally value Australia far higher than just a cash cow.

We did better overall training the doctors and mechanical engineers for free and making them go home, except of course the new elites sometimes became targets for abuse in the independence struggles.