Way of the World Michael Deacon

To our universities, foreign students are much more valuable than British ones. Literally so. This is because they’re allowed to impose far higher tuition fees on the former.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, if some of them are happy to accept foreign applicants who have far lower grades.

That, at any rate, is the eye-opening claim made by a Sunday newspaper. Students from overseas, it alleged at the weekend, “can buy their way on to highly competitive degree courses with as little as a handful of C grades at GCSE. The courses require British students to have A or A* grades at A-level.”

Some people seem to be outraged by this so-called “cash for courses” scheme. Personally, though,

I just think it sounds needlessly overcomplicated. Instead of going to the trouble of teaching rich-but-dim foreign students, surely it would be both simpler and quicker just to sell them degree certificates up front. Say, £150,000 for a first-class degree certificate, £100,000 for a 2:1, and £80,000 for a 2:2. That way, the universities would get their money, the overseas students would get their coveted British degree certificates, and no one would have to spend three long years toiling miserably away at a course for which they weren’t intellectually equipped in the first place. Everyone wins.

Anyway, it’s no good getting cross about “cash for courses” unless we’re prepared to confront the real problem – which is that many universities are in dire financial straits. Indeed, the crisis has grown so severe that Prof Irene Tracey, the vice-chancellor at Oxford, is urging all graduates to make annual donations to their former universities, in order to help them survive. I have only one question.

What if we don’t actually want them to survive?

Frankly, I for one would rather we had fewer universities. At those universities that remained, I think all courses should prepare students for a particular career, rather than saddle them with huge debts for no practical gain. And I’d like employers to stop advertising for graduates unless the job in question requires skills that can be learned only at university. Which most jobs don’t. Such a view may sound dreadfully old-fashioned. But, given the financial mess in which so many of our universities apparently now find themselves, I think it’s time to accept that the wild expansion of higher education was a reckless mistake. There was never any need to send quite so many young people to university. We were better off when the sector was smaller.

Still, the way things are going, it will be smaller again soon enough.

These days, all public institutions are eager to impress us with their forward-looking progressive credentials. It doesn’t matter what type of institution they are, or what service they exist to provide. They must loudly demonstrate that they, and their staff, are fully committed to all the latest ideological trends.

Take, for example, Network Rail. In order to show that our railway stations are “safe and inclusive environments”, it’s just unveiled something it calls a “Pride Pillar”. Located at London Bridge station, this is a concrete pillar that has been decorated with dozens of colourful flags, each of which represents a different sexual minority. Not just gay people, but several rather less well-known communities, too.

For example, there’s a flag that represents “polyamorists”: that is, people who have open marriages. There’s also a flag that represents “aromantics”: that is, people who don’t experience romantic feelings at all.

Even more intriguingly, though, there’s a flag that represents a group known as “demisexuals”. And according to Stonewall, the LGBTQIA+ lobby group, demisexuals are those who feel sexually attracted only to “people with whom they have formed an emotional bond”.

Once upon a time, I can’t help thinking, that description would have fitted almost everyone in the country, back in the distant days of no sex before marriage. Admittedly, such people are no doubt quite a small minority now. But even so, I wasn’t aware that they were being persecuted. Indeed, persecuted so badly that they need reassurance from Network Rail that London Bridge is a “safe and inclusive environment” for them.

Goodness knows what’s been going on in that station. I can only imagine.

“Here, lads. Look at that weirdo over there, getting on the escalator to platform 12. He looks like one of them demisexuals.” “Demisexuals? What are they?” “You know. Blokes who love their wives.”

“What a disgusting freak. Let’s beat him up.”