Carry on campus

Town halls and unringfenced government departments are feeling the pinch, but one corner of British public life is conspicuously flush. Visit almost any university in the land and you will find a small city bursting with Portakabins, scaffolding and cranes. If you dare to raise your eyes from the mud puddles, you will see vast hoardings displaying images of glass palaces.

Higher education is in the throes of its biggest building boom since the 1960s. Whether it is wise or not, whether the financial and academic calculations add up, are questions rarely asked, so loud is the self-congratulation of those pioneering the expansion.

University College London recently clinched what has been described as the biggest loan in British university history (from the European Investment Bank, as it happens) to help fund a new campus in east London. Imperial College, King’s and University of the Arts London are well into building mode, while four in five universities outside the capital are reported to have plans to increase capital spending. The University of Swansea has just opened a smart new riverside campus at a cost of almost half a billion pounds. Pretty much everyone involved with higher education is loving it. There is nothing like a big construction project to get the juices flowing.

But consider who is not running with the herd. Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick and Manchester have no plans for increased intake. Would not many more people benefit from an Oxbridge education? Perhaps. But we are talking about universities, where individual merit and institutional standards are presumably worth something. Some universities have already reduced entrance requirements and it is hard to see how others can increase admissions without lowering standards.

Then there are the finances. The rise in tuition fees to a maximum £9,000 a year for UK and EU students, which every institution promptly imposed, provided more funds.