The idea of the philosopher and its first master A.C. Grayling, the New College of the Humanities will offer courses in law, economics, philosophy, history, and English literature, with one-on-one tutorials and a 10/1 student-teacher ratio.

The 13 other academics involved in the Dream Team are:

- David Cannadine at left-back,
- Richard Dawkins at centre-midfield,
- Ronald Dworkin is the centre forward,
- Christopher Ricks and Peter Singer are on the wings,
- Grayling is goalkeeper,
- Linda Colley and Simon Blackburn are the centre-backs,
- Partha Dasgupta is right-back,
- Steve Jones and Steven Pinker are the other midfielders
- Niall Ferguson, Adrian Zuckerman and Lawrence M Krauss are substitutes

One criticism that will seemingly grow is that NCH will be using the same facilities as the publicly-funded University of London. And will put added pressure there on already extremely scarce room availability. If there’s a room clash, who will win, we wonder.

NCH students will also get to use ULL’s library, union and halls which in especially in the case of the former are already heavily over-subscribed. And, again, who will be given preference?

At £18K and despite the availability of 40 scholarships, the degrees will only be a realistic choice of rich kids. This will take valuable cash away – in the form of fees and also future endowments – from the HE institutions that NCH will be competing with. Something that publicly-funded but increasingly cash-strapped Oxbridge, LSE, UCL and other Russell Group unis will not be too happy about. This unhappiness is all the more likely given the fact that the Dream Teamers are employed by these very same institutions that will lose out.

UCL and LSE, in particular, will not be happy with this up-start at their doorstep nicking their students, occupying their rooms etc.

We also wonder what these academics offer that others don’t. For one thing, NCH graduates will earn a UoL degree like other UoL students. NCH undergrads will have to study three core subjects – logic and critical thinking; science literacy; and applied ethics – and gain an NCH diploma. But is that diploma really worth an extra £27,000?

And what are the students getting from the NCH Dream Team that they can’t get somewhere else? All UK students taking history, economics, law etc. will be reading the same books and covering the same material. For example, philosophy is philosophy wherever you are, there are no new historical events that the Dream Team will have up their sleeves, the teachings of Adam Smith are no different at a non-Russell Group uni and UK law is no different at Leeds Uni or Bangor.

Therefore it would seem the extra £27k is for the personality and the privilege of sitting in the room with the ego that is Dawkins and the other team members. And the access to the network that links this professoriate, of course.

That’s a lot of money for a one-to-one tutorial and a name or two on your resumé.

Firstly, the IfL demands for a £68 annual fee have been met with howls of derision not least because no-one can work out what the IfL is for.

Secondly, it has emerged that Browne’s Review neglected to incorporate the results of a survey costing £68k that revealed just how much opposition there was to fees and debt.

And both the IfL’s missing raison d’etre and Browne’s stitch-up were discussed at EducationState some time ago.

UPDATE: Here is the UCU link explaining their plans for battle and also a link to their anti-IfL petition

“Caught between the rising cost of university tuition in England and the falling percentage of applicants offered places, one British school is giving its students some surprising advice.

By any measure Hockerill Anglo-European College is one of the most successful schools in Britain. Named last month as one of the government’s flagship academies, its students regularly come at or near the top of exam results for the entire country, outperforming such famous names as Eton or Harrow.

But unlike those private schools, where fees can exceed £28,000, or $45,000, a year, Hockerill, in the Hertfordshire town of Bishop’s Stortford, is a state comprehensive, which charges no tuition fees and is forbidden from selecting its students on the basis of academic ability. And while a third of Hockerill’s 830 students are boarders, they are chosen on the basis of need rather than ability to pay. So when Simon Dennis, the school’s principal, heard of government plans to triple university tuition fees in England to £9,000 a year, he decided to make use of the school’s international focus, urging his students to apply to universities abroad and hiring a counselor to help students apply to universities in countries whose fees are cheaper.

“If you can get into the École Normale Supérieure in France and pay about £180 a year for an education at one of the best institutions in the world, why would you pay £9,000 a year in Britain?” Mr. Dennis asked.

Pupils at Hockerill are offered a choice of seven foreign languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese or Mandarin. History and geography classes are taught exclusively in French or German. But with English rapidly becoming the international language of education, even less linguistically flexible students soon find that going abroad can save them money while enhancing the quality of their education.

“Our students can get to Maastricht by train more quickly than they can get to Leeds from London,” Mr. Dennis said. In the Netherlands just over the border from Germany and Belgium, Maastricht University offers a highly regarded undergraduate program taught in English. Tuition fees are €1,672, about £1,430, a year. Germany and France offer even greater savings.

Gus Botsford, a Londoner now in his first year at Maastricht, says he has no regrets about leaving Britain. “I’m at University College, which has a very international atmosphere,” he said, adding that for him the chance to study a broader curriculum, closer to an American liberal arts college than the highly-focused single subject approach common in Britain, was more important than difference in cost. “I have about twice as many contact hours with faculty as some students in England,” he added.

Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a Canadian policy research institute, doubts the British government reckoned on the effect of raising fees in a global market. In a report issued this month, Mr. Usher said the rise was “the largest single increase in tuition fees anywhere in the world since records began,” adding that while the availability of student loans means poorer students will be better off in the short term, the government has done “virtually nothing to reduce the net cost of education for low-income students — a policy which is the cornerstone of U.S. efforts to increase access.”

“It will be interesting to see what pressure this puts even on other parts of the British system,” Mr. Usher said in an interview. Pointing out that Wales has decided not to increase fees, while Scottish universities are still free (to Scottish students; English students in Scotland pay from £1,820 to £2,895 a year), he said, “If I had the choice of paying £4,000 a year in Cardiff or £9,000 a year down the road in England — I’m going to Cardiff.”

The shortage of university places in the past year has already prompted a record number of British students to study outside the country.

At a Westminster Forum conference last week in London on the future of education, Vincenzo Raimo, an official at Nottingham University, said that there are already about 22,000 U.K. students enrolled in degree programs overseas. “There are more British students, as a percentage of full degree students, than there are from China and India,” said Mr. Raimo, whose office runs campuses of Nottingham in Malaysia and China.

With more than 2,400 programs in English just in the non-English speaking parts of Europe, students can choose to study medicine at San Raffaele University in Milan; economics at Aarhus University in Denmark; law at Leiden in the Netherlands; or business at the IE Business School in Madrid. International students at Beijing University can take a full course load in English — and also sign up for free courses in Mandarin.

But the global spread of English has its critics, not all of whom are motivated by nationalism or linguistic chauvinism. Wolfgang Mackiewicz, president of the European Language Council in Berlin, worries that in classrooms where neither the teacher nor the students are native speakers of English the level of instruction is reduced to “the lowest common denominator.”

“I’m not allergic to the use of English at our universities,” he said. “Our academics have to be able to publish their research in English. But they also have to be able to communicate their findings to the local and national communities. There are countries in Europe where people think they’re bilingual, but if you ask them to write they can’t do it.” There is a danger, he added, that “Europe could be reduced to just one gray language. We need people to be not just bilingual but bi-literate.”

“Clearly, there are lots of growing pains as English-language programs expand,” countered Ben Wildavsky, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation and author of “The Great Brain Race.” “But what’s the alternative? Will a critical mass of foreign students be learning Swedish or Finnish or Chinese in order to study in those countries? I don’t think so. The more universities offer programs in English, the more foreign students they can attract. That’s good for the universities, and it’s good for foreign students, who will be able to find opportunities that they might not have had otherwise.”

Mr. Botsford, the Maastricht student, said that “as a native speaker, things can sometimes be frustrating,” but for the most part he has been pleasantly surprised. “All of our tutorials are debate-based, with 12 students sitting in a room arguing about things. The level is very high.”

There are only 4 or 5 British students out of 500 at his college. But last year Maastricht started an ad campaign aimed at Britain. “Considering the way things are going at home,” Mr. Botsford said, he’s expecting plenty of company.”

Some 22,000 UK students are now enrolled on programmes abroad, according to Vincenzo Raimo, director of Nottingham University’s international office.

This figure only counts those who are studying for an entire course in another country, not students who take part in exchanges or spend a term abroad, he said.

At the Westminster Education Forum on higher education in central London, Mr Raimo cited official research which suggests that 1.7% of the UK’s student population are taking courses overseas. In comparison, in China this figure is 1.4% and in India it is 1%.

These two countries are among the UK’s biggest academic competitors with large numbers of students coming to the UK to study each year.

The latest UCAS figures show that in 2010, 8,321 Chinese undergraduates were accepted at UK universities, along with 1,802 Indian students.

Mr Raimo said that with fees rising to a maximum of £9,000 at English universities for home and EU students next year, graduates will be left with debt in the region of £45,000.

“You can go to an existing British university overseas, take the same programme and save between £15,000 and £20,000,” he said.

At one leading Italian university, annual tuition fees stand at between 4,500 euros and 10,700 euros, while at Maastricht fees are 1,672 euros per year.

At Harvard University in the United States, tuition fees are 34,976 dollars (£21,676), Mr Raimo said, but any student whose parental income was less than £60,000 receives a full scholarship.

Copyright © 2011 The Press Association. All rights reserved.

But why is this Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM) university charging the full amount when the science teaching budget is ring-fenced?

A mutiny indeed.

Time for OFFA to flex its muscles? We wait and see.

We say this after receiving one Russell Group uni newsletter where it looks to us that their strategy is to divert attention away as much as possible from the matter at hand i.e. putting a lid on £9k tuition fees.

Red Herring 1: The uni in question claims the Government is communicating with them only through the press.

Red Herring 2: They say that the issues of pricing and fair access have been conflated.

Red Herring 3: There doesn’t seem to be any consensus within Government as to how to address this – quotas, the Office of Fair Access (OFFA).

Red Herring 4: The uni complains that capping fees below £9k doesn’t take into account running costs, funding cuts, increased taxes and greater international competition.

Red Herring 5: Significant improvements have been made in participation of those from lower socio-economic backgrounds under the current arrangements.

Red Herring 6: OFFA has no legal remit where fees are concerned, and should concentrate on fair access as opposed to participation.

Red Herring 7: Research exists showing that it is too late to help the current generation access HE.

We smell fish.

For one thing, the notion of greater international competition for undergraduates is more a hope than a reality. Postgrads and researchers, perhaps. But 18 year olds? The proportion of international undergrads, however lucrative, is dwarfed by that of domestic students. This may change, but it is wrong to complain about something that hasn’t happened yet, and the days of an open market university system is a long way off

The uni also have the temerity to say that through the good work of admissions staff much has been done to increase lower class participation. How sad. There couldn’t be any clearer indication than this that they just don’t get it.

To repeat their own figures: 7% of kids go to private schools so only 7% of uni students should be from those schools. That is fair. Having an informal, unregulated, antiquated and highly subjective system of in-house admission gatekeepers clearly isn’t. Nor does it work. You only have to look at Oxford’s admissions figures to know that.

Apparently OFFA’s job is only to promote fair access and not to widen, or to broaden, HE participation in higher education. But we don’t recognise this difference. We’re talking about the same thing. Access will only be deemed to be fair when participation rates reflect the national demographic.

Worryingly, we are told that OFFA doesn’t have the authority to set or regulate fees. Is this a sign of things to come? Could we see the Russell Group taking the Government to court over a fees cap?

The most shocking thing about the newsletter is the cherry-picking of research to prove a point. We know politicians do this but unis? Shouldn’t they be above such things?

We are told that recent research has emphasised the importance of pre-school years, and the role played by socio-economic factors in educational advantage. As a result, there is no point in OFFA doing anything because it will be too late.

Really? Try telling that to the many late-starters on FE access courses and alike who, against considerable odds and without the support of Russell Group managers it seems, fulfil their ambition to get to uni regardless.

It may be that in the long term “universities are likely to serve the objective of social mobility best by engaging with schools in supporting efforts to enhance attainment and raise aspirations”, and do this through American-style scholarships and bursaries.

Nevertheless, the current generation of would-be students needs help. They need it now and anyone with a social conscience and willing to see the bigger picture will know that £9k pa couldn’t possibly make things any better.

No amount of red herrings will change that.

In the past two years they have been contacted by hundreds of interns, and have tried to shine a light on the problems in the graduate job market. This is what they had to say at the time, and little has changed since:

We want this website to be a forum for interns to share their experiences and discuss the ethics of unpaid employment. Most importantly, we want this site to be a place where YOU can tell us your story.

More and more people our age are trying to gain experience or footholds in an industry by working without pay – Westminster and the media would collapse without us. Yet, nobody knows how many of us there are, what we get up to and what we gain from our experiences. Some of our friends have spent three months photo-copying, been slaves for Chief Executives or, conversely, walked in the corridors of power, and published articles in national newspapers.

We want to hear from people who are, or have been, interns. We want to know if you found your experiences useful or demoralising, if you felt exploited or were treated well. Most of all we want stories, good or bad, that you are willing to share. Did an internship lead to a dream job or give you great experience? Or did you spend three months crying in the toilets of your organisation because your boss treated you like dirt?

This project is about finding out what interns are being made to do, and what they think of it. To do this, we need your help. YOUR contributions are the most important part of this site. We want you to send us blog posts about your experiences to – which we will post ANONYMOUSLY. You can contribute as often as you like, and your articles can be anything from a couple of hundred, to a thousand words long. You have the freedom to write whatever you like, and people will have the chance to discuss it in the comments section.”

Number of young people currently unemployed in the UK and the worst figures since records began: 953,000 (20% of 16-24 year olds).

Nice one, Vince. Only 850,000 to go.

It is a shame you’ve trebled tuition fees and scrapped the EMA so that these youngsters will find it so much more difficult to increase their chances of finding work through improved qualifications.

But fear not. They could always work for free as IDS wants.

We wonder if IDS and Vince willl be doing the same in solidarity with the young. Doubtful.

Do as they say, not as they do?

He is quoted as saying:

“Whilst we welcome signs of an improvement, the job market remains competitive for new graduates, as it does for everyone, and graduates need to work hard to maximise their chances of success. However, a degree remains a good investment in the long term.”

“Internships are an important way of young people getting into the professional jobs market. This is a route being followed by increasing numbers of graduates and – as part of our programme to get Britain working – we continue to encourage employers to offer work experience and internships to help graduates develop valuable skills and boost their employment chances.”

“Over 28,000 internships vacancies have been advertised by employers on the Graduate Talent Pool website since its launch in July 2009. The Graduate Talent Pool is a free website which brings together employers and graduates. There are currently nearly 1,855 internships available, over half of which are paid.”

Yadda, spin, tosh.

Or, put another way, only half of the interns are paid ANYTHING. The other half of these young people – 927 – aren’t paid a single thing. Nada. They are purely and simply working in media companies, banks or wherever to be exploited in the name of getting a foot on the ladder.

David, if you think its okay to be exploited in this way why don’t you work for nothing for months on end. Let’s see how you get on.

We’re all in this together, after all.

We couldn’t help but think that this year – 2011 – will resemble 2010 in so many ways:

-There will be more unnecessary policy innovations handed down from above by vain politicians.

-There will be further criticism of teachers by politicians and businessmen who haven’t got anything better to do.

- Further encroachments into public education will be made by private organisations via their patronage of so-called charitable organisations such as Teach First.

- Wealthy and influential individuals without any classroom teaching experience will continue to meddle in education with charter schools/academies and such like to satisfy their own inflated sense of self and bolster their own public image.

-Parents and pupils will remain baffled by the multitude of course and examination options.

-The A Level and GCSE will again be the target of media attacks.

-Calls will be made for more/less creativity, more/less discipline etc.

-Teachers will remain very much underpaid and continue to work the most overtime of any professional.

-University students will continue to protest at cuts to uni teaching funding and the tuition fees hike.

- Oxbridge and other top unis will continue to be dominated by private school students and comprehensive kid quotas will remain off the agenda.

-Private schools despite their immense wealth will continue to claim their charitable status.

-Selective schools will continue to be called state schools even though they are nothing of the sort.

- And education will remain the plaything of the political and business elites and ordinary, working families who quietly go about paying their taxes and placing their trust in these elites will continue to pay the price.

Happy New Year!