text: The advantages of British universities at the time were high staff-student ratios and frequently excellent staff. Only Oxbridge offered one-on-one tutorials, but almost all the rest had small classes, taught by academics recruited from around the anglophone world. By contrast, my Dutch friends sat passively in huge lecture halls, while professors they hardly ever met held forth in Dutch. The language requirement restricted the teaching talent pool.
  In Berlin, I saw little striving for excellence. Many German students back then spent a leisurely decade at university, often as a sort of hobby while they tended bars or drove taxis. Sitting in classes of 30 students felt like being back at school. In the US, standards were higher — reading lists regularly topped 1,000 pages a week — but classes were Germanic-sized.
  A lot has changed since then. Once British universities began charging tuition fees (now capped at £9,250 a year), their incentive became to pile students high. Student numbers tripled from 1980 to 2010. Since staff numbers didn’t triple, class sizes at many universities reached European levels. The world’s top 100 universities for staff-student ratios now include no British institutions, according to Times Higher Education magazine.
  This autumn, despite coronavirus, British admissions appear to have hit a new record. The universities’ need to pack in as many fee-paying students as possible even during a pandemic explains the outbreaks of coronavirus now rippling predictably through dozens of halls of residence. The UK’s coming demographic bulge of 18-year-olds will probably keep student numbers rising for a few years yet.
  “More will mean worse,” warned novelist and academic Kingsley Amis in 1960. Aggregate rankings of British universities in the global QS league table have fallen for four years running. From next year, because of Brexit, new European students in England will pay higher fees. They may look elsewhere, along with thousands of European academics in Britain, especially once their universities lose EU research funding.
  British universities will still be cheaper than American ones. The average cost of private four-year US colleges has reached $50,000 a year, fees and residential expenses combined. A professor at a second-tier American university translated this for me: many parents are paying $200,000 to fund a child’s drinking habit. I refuse to do that.