But academics at Oxbridge dislike the idea of losing the college fee. That is because it would mean colleges losing power to central departments at the two universities. Most of the teaching of arts and humanities – particularly at Oxford – is done through the colleges, which hire their own staff. Without the fee, colleges would have less say when it comes to recruitment – and arts subjects might suffer.

The more the financing goes through the university the more arts people would find themselves competing with scientists for staff and equipment. In that he questioned whether the extra funding for Oxford and Cambridge represented value for money Ministers decided to have a look They asked the Higher Education Funding Council to advise. It did so last month in the form of options: funding could stay as it was, it said; or the college fee could be abolished; or the extra money could be subsumed into the general grant for the universities and phased out over a period of years as a new formula to reward high-quality teaching was introduced. Oxbridge would lose 25 per cent of its extra funding over five years as efficiency gains, he suggests, on the grounds that those two universities have not suffered as much as others in recent years. In return the universities would do their damnedest to push up the number from state schools.The current tussle dates back to the summer, when Sir Ron Dearing published his report on higher education. The two ancient universities have been very open about their figures, a spokesman for Cambridge says. Why couldn’t other universities publish their data?Ryan believes the Government could help Oxbridge to recruit more students from the state sector by telling comprehensive schools to encourage pupils to aim high.

“You couldn’t tell how good she was because nobody had said to her, `You will get these kinds of questions and these are the kind of things that would count as an answer.’”I have no doubt I could have taught her quite a lot of philosophy over a period of three years. That’s what drives one mad, really.”Oxbridge also ask why they are made the whipping boys when institutions such as Bristol, the LSE and University College London also recruit substantial numbers of privately educated pupils but keep quiet about it. And so on.Unkind observers wonder why more action could not have been taken before. In mitigation, the universities talk of intimidation about or prejudice against Oxbridge in the state sector. Some comprehensive school teachers put bright pupils off applying, they claim. They tell them Oxbridge is snooty and elitist and not for them. Or they simply do not know how to prepare clever pupils for interview.Last week, for example, Alan Ryan, warden of New College, Oxford, interviewed a girl from a comprehensive school who had applied off her own bat.

She wanted to read French and philosophy after reading the pop philosophy book Sophie’s World. The school could not teach her anything about philosophy at all and could not find time to tell her anything about how to conduct herself in interview, he says. So, a ratio that would reflect the achievements of the population at large would be more like 37.5/62.5.So far the universities are a long way short of those proportions. Oxford performs worse than Cambridge and appears to lack its colleague’s enthusiasm for seeking out state-school applicants – though its spokesmen deny the charge. It takes more pupils from independent schools than from state schools.