PRIVATE businesses could call themselves universities if the Government scraps the minimum institutional requirement of 4,000 students, The Times Higher Education Supplement (November 21) reports.

Critics fear that this will open the floodgates to commercial organisations that wish to establish “universities”, dilute the international reputation of UK universities and encourage the “McDonaldisation” of higher education.

But the Standing Conference of Principals sees hope in the Government’s consultation paper on rules governing university status. In the document, proposals are set out to make it easier for “organisations outside the traditional university and college sector” to attain degree-awarding powers.

Although the paper states that the minimum student-numbers requirement should remain, it welcomes views on how appropriate this criterion is for “smaller, specialist organisations”.

A report by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi) says that the relaxation of university rules is likely to lead to single-subject commercial universities, such as a Microsoft or Ford Motor Company University. Bahram Bekhradnia, director of Hepi, said that despite ministers’ concerns about opening the floodgates, “I think they do want to open the sector to outside forces”.

Academics are split over the relaxation of the rules. While James Tooley, professor of education policy at Newcastle University, sees it as a “vote winner” with middle-class families who send their children to small specialist colleges, Kel Fidler, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Northumbria, fears that it will “let in all kinds of people who have a strange idea of what a university is”.

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