On the face of it, this year’s Nobel Prize awards have been a triumph for British scientists. No fewer than five laureates come from these shores: three physicists, one chemist and an economist. But before anyone starts praising our higher education system, there is one small snag: all five are currently working at US universities.
David Thouless, who was awarded half the Physics prize, has followed a typical career path. After taking a degree at Cambridge, he took a PhD at Cornell University and a postdoc at the University of California before heading back to Britain, where he worked for 13 years at the University of Birmingham. There, he started the work that would eventually win him his Nobel prize. But it might not have happened if he had not taken up an appointment as professor of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, where his work was far better funded.
Plenty of Nobel prizes have been won at British universities, but there is a very definite direction of travel for ambitious British academics: across the Atlantic, where the pay is far better and the facilities superior to those in Britain. American universities lead the world because the best of them tend to be private — and meritocratic in nature. Their success puts Britain’s publicly owned universities to shame. They are wealthy because they ask those who can afford it to pay the real cost of the tuition — while making sure that those who can’t afford it are subsidised. It is easier for the children of the poor to study at Yale than at Oxford, because Yale’s fees are means tested and funded through scholarships rather than loans.
British higher education, by comparison, seems increasingly to be run as a branch of the welfare state.
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