As maintenance grants are being replaced by loans, students graduating from universities have increasingly had to start in paid work with a not inconsiderable load of debt. The general impression has been of a leveling down in the quality of university education. Some have suggested in the media that no British university can now compare in standard with the best U.S. universities such as Harvard, Yale or Massachusetts Institute of Technology and have urged that, to counter the downward trend, the top British universities should become private institutions where students pay full fees and seek private sponsorship on an American scale. This would be hardly possible in Britain today. In fact, the general accusation of falling standards in top British universities is certainly exaggerated.
British universities do, however, face additional problems to funding.
The insistence of university staff on the maintenance of national pay scales when clearly standards and conditions vary, and the opposition of university staff to a proper assessment system, raise popular doubts about the value of the work of university staff. Staff opposition to incentive payments makes it increasingly difficult for universities to induce the best graduates to stay on at university after graduation to teach and do research when they see their contemporaries with less outstanding qualifications quickly earning more in finance, industry and commerce than they could earn as full professors.