University Leader Says Britain's Top 5 Institutions Should Go Private

The rector of one of Britain’s leading universities says that institutions like his should be allowed to “float free” from government constraints and fully privatize, thereby letting them “charge unlimited tuition fees and take on more overseas students.”

In an interview with London’s Evening Standard, Sir Roy Anderson, rector of Imperial College London, said that the multibillion-pound higher-education industry is “staggeringly” important to Britain and is “one of the few things we are world-competitive in.”

The top five universities — which he identified as his institution, the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and University College London — “have enormous potential to earn income for Britain,” and can be fully competitive only if they are not “subject to the mores of government funding or changing educational structures.”

The British government is expected to soon begin a review of the current financing system, under which tuition at English universities is capped at just over £3,000 a year. —Aisha Labi