Universities

People get competitive about the difficulty of their degrees. The accepted line at Oxford is that Science is harder than Arts, and everything is harder than PPE - three years of sleeping until 1pm and waffling about Mill’s Utilitarianism, and you still get to tell employers that you have a degree in economics. It’s probably true about the PPEists, but the Arts vs. Science stuff is a myth. Scientists’ claim to the tougher time is based on the fact that they have more contact hours. More contact hours, we are often told, make a more serious degree: it was reported as a scandal in May when Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, said the average British undergraduate gets less than 14 hours a week with academic staff.

I remember telling my friends that I was going to row at Oxford. I could picture myself in flattering Magdalen College Boat Club lycra, a rosy glow on my cheeks as I enjoyed boat-based camaraderie with my team mates on a crisp spring morning. I didn’t even make it to the river. After a week of leaving grimy gyms with sore muscles and a sense of inadequacy, I jumped ship. My only contact with the sport since has been bumping into the rowers on my corridor on the way to the shower, on the rare occasions when I’m up before 10. Back from their 6am appointments with frostbite on the Thames, reached only after a 30 minute bike ride, my friends appear in a new light: disciplined, fit, driven and organised. It’s disturbing.

On waking up (at noon) on Thursday morning, I found I had a text from one of my fellow History freshers. Sent at 6am and accompanied by a screenshot of a half-finished essay: ‘WHY am I still up?!’ The all-nighter is a notorious Oxford experience, and not one I thought I would ever have to sample. ‘I’ll be fine getting the work done at university,’ I blithely assured those warning me of how unstructured a History student’s life is, ‘I like to keep busy.’ What I failed to appreciate is that it’s impossible not to be busy at university. School without lessons was dire — by Tuesday afternoon of the pre-Christmas week of ‘fun’ I had lost the will to live, let alone make Chemistry-themed paper-chains.

I’ve been at university for 17 days, and yesterday had my fifth contact hour: my second tutorial. ‘Tutes’ are what an Oxford education is all about. They’re the reason any self-respecting applicant will give when asked why they’re putting themselves through a three-month ordeal of entrance tests; essay samples; interviews, and an agonising, Christmas-ruining wait. Of course we weren’t swayed by the architecture, the prestige or the challenge: what we really wanted, my sixth-form self often insisted, was the chance to be ‘taught by the people who write the textbooks’. It’s now dawning on me that we’re not really ‘taught’ at all — not in the conventional sense.

My freshers’ pack (a yo-yo, two balloons, a sachet of instant hot chocolate and a condom) is barely visible beneath English Historical Documents, volume 1. Two nights of dancing knee-deep in foam has taken its toll on my shoes, and I feel slightly tricked - encouraged to partake in a week of university-approved partying, and then, two days in, given a 19-item reading list and an essay due in for next week. School friends’ Facebook pages are torturous: three weeks into term at other universities, yet to hand in their first piece of work and seemingly out every night. At dinner the conversation has morphed from ‘So where are you from?’ to ‘You haven’t started writing yet either, have you?’.

My mum had a friend at university who had been called ‘Pudding’ at school. They’d sometimes be walking down the street, and someone who had known the now-svelte adult as a chubby 13-year-old would say ‘Hello, Pudding’. As I get ready to start at university myself in October, it’s in the knowledge that my schoolgirl self will be even harder to escape. Reinventing yourself at the end of sixth form was once a time-honoured rite of passage, hindered only by a few easily avoided old acquaintances.

My A-level results day almost passed me by. It took an early morning email from an editor asking for a piece about the experience for me to remember. After a few clicks – no daunting brown envelope nowadays – I’d discovered my reasonably average grades and continued with my day. No need for celebration, but no sense of disaster, either. Towards the end my first year at college, there came a point in time when I had to make a decision. I knew where I wanted to get to; I had dreamed of being a journalist since I was first allowed to stay up and watch the News at Ten as a kid. The only thing I wasn’t sure about was how to get there. If I was a year older, I would probably have been asking myself which degree to choose.

Yesterday came the news that net migration has once again fallen, this time to its lowest level for ten years. In the year ending September 2012, net migration was 153,000. That is a fall of 89,000 on the previous year when it reached a dizzy 242,000. This is undeniably good news. The public have consistently shown their desire to see net migration reduced and we now have a government which is committed to lowering net migration and has so far had considerable success. Many on the left, who cannot bring themselves to admit that net migration of 200,000 per year is too much for a small island such as ours, continue to perpetuate the idea that, in the process of reducing net migration the government is harming the economy.

The mis-selling of higher education is one of the least remarked-upon scandals of our time, but anyone under 40 should be familiar with the concept. You’re told, at school, that a degree will make you far better-off. Politicians even put a price on it: a degree will make you, on average, £100,000 better-off in your lifetime. But this is a fake figure, produced by mashing together law and medicine degrees with others. And when you get to university, you find the ‘tuition’ involves being asked to sit in crowded lecture theatres (or watch on a video in an overflow room) and be told to go read books.

The combined endowments of the three top US universities alone is more than Britain's entire defence budget. Luckily the risk of American invasion is still one of graduate students seeking a cheaper option, with old-world charm and brand name. But the days of Oxbridge and the Russell Group holding ranks with the 'new money' Ivy League are numbered. Not just because more money funds more, and better, research. But because US universities also use that money to do a better job finding, investing in and nurturing potential – potential often still excluded in the UK. They show that excellence need not mean elitism, and that’s a lesson the British academe needs to learn if it is to continue to compete globally.

If the devil were to conduct an experiment into mankind’s ability to resist temptation, it would look something like Stanford University. It is built in one of the world’s most agreeable climates and everyone dresses as if they have just stepped off the beach - which lies only half an hour away. Hammocks lie between trees, as if to tempt the weak-willed on their way to lectures. There are jazz clubs, golf courses and swimming pools - and 1,700 students are added each  year, to see if they get any work done. But they do, enough to make Stanford one of the world’s best universities. In fact, 22 of the top 30 are American – and its universities are pulling way ahead of Britain in the world intellectual league tables.