What a tough choice: a degree or a new car?

So how are you on the "feminisation of nature"? No? Not up to speed? Then let me try you on the "sexualisation of colonial space". Still a bit rusty? Allow me in that case to recommend the three-year BA in geography and gender studies at the University of Sussex. I don't in all honesty know anyone who's taken it, but it's hard to see how you can go wrong with a course investigating "gendered approaches to landscape analysis", to say nothing of "the growing emphasis on geographies of resistance, including gay and lesbian space".

Count the buzzwords, I say, and if you can find them all in a single paragraph of a single university prospectus - colonial, sexualisation, gender, space, resistance, gay, lesbian and landscape - you'd be a fool not to snap up the degree. So what the hell, if it will soon be costing you £3,000 a year for the privilege. You'll earn it back as a qualified gender geographer in two shakes of a donkey's tail, or in two shakes of a mule's if you prefer creatures incapable of invidious procreation, as of course you will when you've done a BA in geography and gender studies at the University of Sussex.

Ditto film studies at Falmouth College of Arts, where, while "issues of gender" remain as central as you would hope, you can also dip your toes into topics which "traditional film programmes usually leave out", such as "audience research" and "the cult of stars and celebrities", and maybe even popcorn purchase and means of ingestion of same while you're at it.

One should not, I know, deride the efforts of institutions of higher education to ingratiate themselves into the favours of the young. Too easy. And it's not as though we would necessarily do better. The last time I had to come up with an aims and objectives prospectus for my academic specialism, all I could think of saying was that students would be told to read what I told them to read and would be taught to read it rigorously. An aim (or was it an objective?) which some in my department considered a touch imperious. What if, to take a random objection, students wanted to read something other than what I wanted them to read, or were happy to read what I wanted them to read, but not to read it rigorously? "Then in either of those instances the fuckwits will fail," I recall explaining sweetly. But they don't encourage failure talk in prospectuses.

Myself, I'd burn the lot down today, given the chance. Universities, ex-polytechnics, colleges of art, all of them. Forswear the word "gender" or burn, is my position. And the word "media" while you're at it. And the word "colonial", whether in the locution "pre-colonial" or "post-colonial". And the word "French", particularly in the usage "As the French semiologist X says...". If you can't get by without quoting a French semiologist, then burn.

In the meantime I do not understand why everyone is getting so upset by the prospect of top-up fees. Yes, I grant you it is no nice thing to leave university and enter full-time occupation up to your eyeballs in debt, but what's £9,000 if you're a lawyer or a banker? Assume my solicitor to be having to pay back his student loan and he is halfway there just by writing me a letter. Let him but call me to his office and the debt's cleared. Similarly the surgeon straightening my bowel. And the boy wonder from the City advising me on my investments, allowing that I have no investments. Peanuts. Peanuts what we are asking such graduates to pay back. £9,000? The cost of a weekend in the Maldives for two, if you're careful which hotel you pick. But there is a conspiracy of perturbation abroad, pretending that a small sum is a large sum, because we do not want the working classes to know how wide the difference really is between us and them.

The poor, those who oppose top-up fees argue, will be put off higher education by this vast burden of potential debt. Will they? Put off by the cost of a motor? And if we really fear that this pittance will dissuade them from opting for an education in favour of a cardboard box on Wardour Street, is it not our duty to persuade them of their folly? Take them through it slowly: this is what you will earn as managing director of Always Late Trains, or as chairman of Directory Misinformation Ltd, or as a glittering celebrity of the sort you can major in at Falmouth College of Arts; and this is what you will have to pay back. Feel the pain? Of course you won't. A second armagnac resisted every other week for a year, a spree in Dolce and Gabbana declined, and you're home. And should you decide to do something more modest with your education, become a schoolteacher, say, or a gender-crazed academic running seminars on sexualised landscape at the University of Sussex, you won't feel the pain either because you'll be earning so little that your debt will never be called in.

Behold the subtle workings of a well-devised society: the more we need you, the poorer we'll keep you, because the poorer we keep you, the less of your keep we will ask you to pay back. Now tell us that we do not value the profession of teaching!

That this is an argument for increasing top-up fees even further should be obvious to anyone with the will to see it. Three thousand, thirty thousand, three hundred thousand pounds a year. The sky's the limit. Once again only those who earn plenty will refund it, while our teachers, intellectuals, nurses and whoever else we respectfully consign to penury may enjoy the benefits of a free education for life.

Of course, another way of funding universities would be to cut out media and gender studies altogether and sell off the space and furniture released, but you can't have everything.