British universities, particularly those founded before 1992, are doing well. With the highest undergraduate fees in Europe, at £9,000 (US$12,725) per year for most degrees for most students, many institutions boast annual surpluses of tens of millions of pounds.
Much of this money has been splurged on vanity projects. My own university, the University of Nottingham, has undertaken vast and expensive “improvements,” and it is certainly not alone. A few of these projects have added to resources for teaching and research, but many others — a jumbotron, a giant chess set, a catastrophe-prone IT system which has so far been […]
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