UK universities should be allowed to charge higher tuition fees to students from affluent families in order to subsidise the costs incurred by those from poorer backgrounds, according to a US university president and higher education economics expert.

Morton Schapiro, president of Northwestern University in Illinois, said that it was reasonable to charge students a fee that more accurately reflects the costs that a university incurs during their time at the institution, particularly if their parents ¡°are hedge fund operators and are incredibly affluent¡±.

Defending the fees charged by private colleges, Professor Schapiro said that about 50 US institutions, including his own, now had the resources and the will to ¡°completely break the link between ability to pay and being admitted¡±, by means-testing those who should pay tuition fees in full, and those who should receive financial support.

¡°A lot of places, in an effort to be affordable, just don¡¯t generate the revenues to support a high-quality education, and nobody wants that,¡± he said.

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¡°At Northwestern, if you are brilliant enough to get in but you can afford nothing, you pay nothing. About half of our students pay less than half of the ¡®sticker price¡¯, and about a third of those pay pretty much nothing ¨C that includes room and board.¡±

Professor Schapiro was in the UK to meet with Northwestern alumni. A previous visit, in 2011, came shortly after J. Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at the university, made headlines for including a ¡°live sex show¡± in an extracurricular theoretical discussion of the female orgasm.

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Speaking on his latest visit, Professor Schapiro called the incident one of the most challenging of his five years at the institution.

¡°It put us big time in the news for a week or two,¡± he said. ¡°[Professor Bailey] still teaches graduate students, and that course on human sexuality is still offered in the psychology department¡±, although he said that it is now taught by a different faculty member.

¡°It is no longer as highly enrolled as it was when you had demonstrations and stuff,¡± he added.

Listen to the interview with Professor Schapiro

chris.parr@tsleducation.com