The £54,000 degree: how well is AC Grayling's university doing?

By Amelia Gentleman. It's a year since AC Grayling's New College of the Humanities opened for business, with its big-name lecturers and £18,000-a-year fees. Is it succeeding in its mission to be 'elite but not exclusive'?
At 9.30am promptly, AC Grayling begins a two-hour Introduction to Philosophy lecture for year one students in an airy conservatory at the back of his new private college. For anyone whose attention is straying, there are views on to a yard with plane trees, a white stucco mews house and the blackened brick of the smart Bloomsbury townhouse where the New College of the Humanities is based. None of the 19 students is gazing out of the window, however. They are focused on the lecture, which centres on René Descartes, but considers along the way the nature of knowledge and how we obtain it. More...