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Commentators react to the launch of a private college which aims to rival Oxford and Cambridge and plans to charge £18,000 a year.

London Mayor that he thought of the idea first as it is clear there is not enough provision in the UK for elite students:

"It is the boldest experiment in higher education since the University of Buckingham was founded in 1983, and it fully deserves to succeed and to be imitated.
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"If academics are fed up with the tyranny of the Research Assessment Exercise; if they are demoralised by endless government attacks on their admissions procedures; if they feel they are being scapegoated for the weaknesses of the schools, then the New College for the Humanities shows the way."

High Mistress of St Paul's Girls' School she is not scared of the risks students would have to take to go to the college:

"Ultimately, New College will succeed only if real students paying real fees want to go there. Can anything so brazenly new-minted hope to rival Oxford and Cambridge? I think so. I would encourage students to consider it alongside other leading academic institutions. The pioneering spirit of its founders is optimistic, courageous, ambitious and not complacent. This is an essentially young spirit to which New College's first generation of undergraduates, about to identify themselves, will want to respond. And what if this seems risky, untested and slightly uncharted territory? Blazing a trail and shaping the new is what my students do all the time. I hope some of them will be fortunate enough to become part of the pioneering generation of the New College of the Humanities and the exciting intellectual landscape it seems set to create."

the claim that this will be a private Oxbridge, but does commend one element it copies:

"Where Grayling's model is genuinely attractive is that these lecturers will be giving one-to-one tuition to students. This is a teaching method that only Oxford and Cambridge practice and it is the single most valuable aspect of their educational offering. It is very hard for a student to bluff in such a rigorous environment and therefore encourages the detailed reading and hard work that we would want our children to undertake at university: perhaps the biggest complaint both parents and students have of universities in this country, is the lack of "face-time" with teaching staff."

that by necessity the college won't be egalitarian:

"So who would this appeal to? The answer 'people with significantly more money than sense' comes to mind. The prospectus is all about 'Oxford, Cambridge this, Ivy League that', but the actual educational offering appears to be more like an attempt to recreate the American concept of the liberal arts college education. And when I say 'liberal arts college education', the phrase 'liberal arts college' is meant to convey the impression 'eyeball-searingly overpriced'... This thing, if it has any chance of paying a return on the money invested, is going to be targeted at the seriously rich - probably the international rich - and it is not going to be made appreciably more egalitarian by the proposed scholarship grants."

Head of Lancaster University's English department that there will be serious consequences to the whole of society:

"This piece of the so-called private sector will actually be parasitic on the public one, rather like surgeons who use public facilities for private operations. The college's degrees will be awarded by the University of London, which ought to know better than to collude in an enterprise which could result in seeing its professors poached by those with the biggest bank balances. London Uni will share its libraries and other facilities too, thus ensuring that its own students are forced to share resources with those who have bought their way in... Just when the real Oxford and Cambridge have been dragging themselves inch by inch into the modern democratic world, an ultra-Oxbridge is being proposed which will probably have an even lower intake of working class students than Cambridge did when I was there in the 1960s. Grayling's scheme is odious."