As the academic year winds down into summer lethargy, the Association of University Teachers is getting ready to disrupt the August admissions season. Next term there will be a student campaign of refusal to pay tuition fees. Academics want higher salaries; the students don’t want to pay fees. Because the taxpayer wants to pay no more taxes, solidarity between teachers, the taught, and the general public is unlikely. In the background are grumbles over falling standards, inadequate facilities and bureaucratic overload. The only thing about tertiary education on which everyone agrees is that it is a mess.

It is a big and expensive mess. Omitting Scotland, by 1996-7 there were some 1.7m students, of whom about 1m are doing undergraduate degrees, 260,000 taught postgraduate courses, 90,000 graduate work, and another 250,000 who defeated classification. Tertiary education employs about 110,000 faculty-76,000 men and 34,000 women. Higher education (a degree course) and further education (most other forms of post-school education) get ?11.6 billion a year between them in public money. About ?6 billion of it is spent by higher education and of this about ?4.5 billion-including all the money for teaching and much of what is given for research facilities-is allocated by the Higher Education Funding Council. The pace of expansion has been impressive: between 1980 and 1995 the number of men on degree courses doubled and that of women quadrupled. In class terms, the change is less impressive: 55 per cent of children from the top of the income scale used to go to university, now more than 80 per cent do; 6 per cent from the bottom of the scale went on to higher education, now 14 per cent do. And quality, too, has had to give. More than a third of school leavers today go on to tertiary education, but over the past ten years expenditure per head has shrunk by 25 per cent. Most academics prefer the figure of a 40 per cent reduction since Mrs Thatcher took office in 1979.

Even those of us who regard the complaints of academics with some equanimity may be anxious for the future. There are only half as many places for new post-graduates in philosophy and politics as the number of staff retiring each year. Few really clever and ambitious students now go into academic life. The brain drain to the US is less serious in the humanities than the brain drain into the City, journalism, law and commerce. Economics graduates with first class degrees avoid academic life-and rightly. Academics’ pay has fallen far behind that of their peers-schoolteachers, civil servants and politicians-while the demands on them have increased. Professors used to be paid the same as under-secretaries in the civil service; they are now paid half as much. ?35,000, which is the base pay for professors, is what a national newspaper journalist gets after a couple of years on the job. An engineer, who would start on ?17,500 in the academy-aged 28 and with a PhD-would get ?20,000 and more if he went straight into employment with a decent first degree.

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