My New Year's resolution was to stop looking at university league tables. Ground into the dust already. The tables are so addictive that I've even been poring over the "tables behind the tables". Most league tables are based on a number of separate measures. The QS World University Rankings, for example, use "proportion of international students" as one measure of the quality of a university. This table alone can yield hours of entertainment.
Whether or not it is a sensible measure I'll leave to others. But ranking universities purely by the proportion of their international students gives a startling result: of the top 20 institutions in the world, 10 are in London. These include not just the obvious London Business School (3rd), LSE (4th) and School of Oriental and African Studies (8th), but also London Met (18th) and Middlesex (19th).
It should be no surprise that, by proportion of students, London is the most international university city in the world, but I can't remember hearing that particular boast before. And trust me, I've heard a lot of boasts about universities. We can trumpet the UK as a whole, containing 20 universities in the world's top 40, by this measure.
Not all league tables are so heartening, and I've been bringing myself back down to earth by looking at some that rank universities by the size of their endowment. A couple of months ago a remarkable statistic was floating around higher education blogs. Stanford University has 45% of its academic staff in the humanities, whereas only 15% of its students major in humanities subjects.
How can Stanford afford to keep so many world-class humanities scholars on such a slender student base? Here's a clue: Stanford's endowment is over $17bn, and with a student body of about 16,000, that is over $1m per student.
Harvard, Yale, MIT and Princeton also belong to the $1m-per-student club. Further down the list, the US has more than 60 universities with an endowment over $1bn. The UK has two. No prizes for guessing which. Only a handful here even reach £100m, a level achieved by more than 300 in North America. Few UK universities can match, for example, Muhlenberg College in rural Pennsylvania, with 2,200 students and an endowment of $150m, placing it at about 320th on the North American list.
A large endowment, relative to student numbers, gives extraordinary freedom. A scientist colleague of mine remembers her time in the US when, if she needed some equipment, she ordered it, whatever the cost. No forms, no waiting for months for approval, just a phone call.
Recently Princeton, Yale, Harvard, MIT, Dartmouth and Amherst College have introduced "needs-blind" admission for international as well as US students. As in the UK, admission offers are made without considering the financial circumstances of the student. But unlike the UK, the university picks up the tab if the student's family can't afford to pay. A policy like this requires vast resources – which they have.
We shouldn't forget, though, that in the UK many universities have run successful campaigns to fund new buildings, academic positions and studentships, sometimes drawing in hundreds of millions. And long may it last. But this money is normally spent within a few years of receipt and does not add to a university's endowment.
Most UK universities share a dilemma faced by ordinary families the world over: when some money comes in, it gets spent more or less right away, to meet pressing needs or pay off debts. Only the rich have the luxury of saving and enjoying the interest.
Perhaps we shouldn't worry. UK universities are doing pretty well, if measured by the quality of our research and, as we saw, the attractiveness of our universities to international students. Even if half a dozen US universities offer needs-blind admissions, their undergraduate programmes are small.
These six together take roughly the same number of undergraduates as the University of Manchester on its own. True, they can skim off the very best, but their numerical impact on the world market is negligible. Perhaps the most astonishing thing of all about the elite US universities is how few undergraduate students they have relative to the size of their reputations.