Don’t let grifters kill the university

The Jason Arday scandal blew up because it captures a sense of grift that now seems endemic in British higher education. His employment at Cambridge was the coup de grâce, revealing that corruption has even reached our supposed time-honored centers of intellectual excellence. This crisis has been coming for years, if not decades. The problems in higher education span multiple lines of criticism across financing, geography, and standards. Every possible solution to one criticism promises to exacerbate another. Is it time to cut the Gordian knot? Or is higher education too big to fail? Trust in the quality of the product itself has corroded. A third of Britons now believe a degree is not worth the time and money. One recent IFS report suggested one-in-four graduates will lose out financially