All I can report is that a number of young people made this point.What is not in dispute, though, is the growing demand for cross-border higher education at English-speaking universities. We will inevitably respond to this demand; the market will see to that. What we need to think about is how to balance foreign students with the UK student body, making sure that both benefit as they should. We need to ponder how to get the best students and whether to encourage them to stay after their courses. In November, on a plane between Shanghai and Beijing, I sat next to the dean of a British art school, who said he had been touring round a dozen or more colleges, selecting the best Chinese students for his school.

He is not alone.By contrast, and notwithstanding the University of Wales’s valiant efforts in Bangalore, the US, not Britain, seems to be the destination of choice of the brightest Indians. We seem to have made a collective decision to go hard for China but not so hard for India. There must be some limit to the extent to which students can benefit from higher education. But my instinct is that the 50 per cent target is quite a sensible one. Better to have some wastage, with higher drop-out rates, than to deny anyone the fullest education that he or she can use. The issue for us is how far to pitch our wares to these two giant markets.

Not training them to the fullest possible extent must be nuts.Globalisation will race on for another generation at least China and India will see to that. Unless we deliberately try to choke off demand, we will see an increase in student numbers. If British students are put off by having to fund a higher proportion of their undergraduate education, there is plenty of demand from abroad. The export market, so to speak, will pick up any decline in demand from the home market.It would be odd if home students were deterred, for Britain has an unusually large gap, at least by European standards, between the earnings of graduates and high-school leavers. In purely economic terms, it makes more sense in Britain to stay on an get a degree than it would in, say, Germany.I suspect, too, that demand for higher degrees will continue to rise, as the best jobs increasingly require it. We have a comparative advantage in being able to get people to a masters standard in only four years (three at Oxbridge), making a British degree a good deal by international standards.Whether the target of this government to get 50 per cent of school-leavers into higher education will or should be attained is not clear.

This is the result of several factors, including obvious ones such as relatively strong funding, but also less obvious ones including the lure of being able to stay in the States and get a job after graduation. UK universities may be struggling, but the brand evidently remains strong.Third, the US is streaking ahead. It dominates research, scoring tops on measures such as Nobel prize winners, but it also dominates in market terms: it is the number one destination for the best students. In Bangalore earlier this month I saw an advert for a University of Wales degree to be awarded to students at a local campus. The US and to a smaller degree the UK have been the main beneficiaries of this trend – a similar shift as has occurred in manufacturing and financial services. Until recently this mainly affected the postgraduate sector, but now the undergraduate business is going global too. For example, there are some 70,000 Chinese students – at various levels – in Britain, and the US has become an increasingly popular option for young British people for their first degree.Distance learning and local franchising has also boomed.