A POSITIONAL ARMS RACE COMES NEXT. George Leef of Phi Beta Cons turns up a British version of access-assessment-remediation-retention. The BBC obtains an internal memorandum from Manchester Metropolitan University.

"As a university we do not award as many Firsts and 2.1s as other comparable institutions so there is an understandable desire to increase the proportion of such awards," it says.

"Please bear this in mind when setting your second and final year assessments, especially the latter."

The e-mail goes on: "We have never received any external examiner criticism that our 'standards' are too low so there should be quite a lot of leeway available to us all when assessments are set."

The e-mail also includes a joke about boosting the student satisfaction rating. Earlier this year, staff at Kingston University were caught urging students to falsify their responses to improve the university's standing in league tables.

It says: "Please do not complain when all the BSc (Hons) mathematics students gain first class awards next summer. Now that really would increase our student satisfaction!"

Like the Ivies and Lake Wobegon, all are above average.

The number of students achieving a first class degree at UK universities has more than doubled since the mid-1990s.

Among last year's university leavers, 61% achieved a first class or upper second class degree.

Such is the level of concern that Phil Willis, chair of the House of Commons select committee on innovation, universities, science and skills, wants to examine the threat to higher education standards.

The article hints at Britain running a balance of trade surplus in higher education. What it says about college readiness among native Britons calls for further research.

This is the latest warning about university standards, following a whistleblower's account of postgraduate degrees being awarded to students who could barely speak English.

This prompted thousands of academics and students to get in touch with the BBC with their own worries - including that financial pressures were leading universities to recruit and pass overseas students who did not reach the adequate academic standards.

The response from BBC News website readers also included e-mails showing how an external examiner had been persuaded to change her mind over criticisms of a degree course.

Many have described the conflict of interest between universities' self-regulation on degree grades and their need to compete in league tables.

The chief executive of the Quality Assurance Agency, Peter Williams, reflected some of these concerns about an over-dependence on overseas students.

Sounds like the wrong kind of excess capacity, yet again. I have not found evidence from the United States to suggest that I back off from claiming that the higher education positional arms race is driven in part by students' fears of being stuck with an institution that grants a meaningless degree, and wonder if Manchester Metropolitan is not a leading indicator of the same phenomenon in Britain.