So you want to be a nuclear physicist. I bet your parents are horrified. Nor do they want you to be an Oxford Don or a classicist. That's the bizarre British conundrum that Gail Trimble can't answer. When the University Challenge contestant let slip that she would like to be an academic when she finishes her doctorate in Latin literature, the comment that surprised her most was, “get a job”.

Parents in Britain spend more than £1.5 billion a year on tutoring. Many have spent this term agonising over whether Freya or Felix will get into a grammar school. They are thrilled if their child is asked to join the Government's gifted programme. Schools are assessed on their academic league tables. Gordon Brown's sole intervention in education as Chancellor came when he tried to help Laura Spence get into Oxford.

Yet once undergraduates arrive at the dreaming spires or the red bricks it would be a calamity if they actually decided to stay and become a don. What a waste of an education. Britain lauds its television presenters, not its academics. Sir David Attenborough is Britain's most famous naturalist; 100 years ago it was Charles Darwin. Young historians want to be Andrew Roberts, Willie Dalrymple, Simon Sebag Montefiore or better still Amanda Foreman whose book on Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire was turned into the film starring Keira Knightley. They want to visit the White House, appear in glossy magazines and be asked to write lucrative articles in newspapers. They'd rather not disappear into the dusty corridors of academia never to be seen again. Boris Johnson uses his classics education to entertain. Carol Vorderman is Britain's best known mathematician. Stranger still, the diminishing role of the academic in Britain has coincided with a massive expansion of higher education. We now want half the country to reach university but we deride those who will teach them when they get there.

The rising number of students partly explains why becoming an academic is such an unappealing career. The amount of government money universities receive for each graduate has fallen by 50 per cent in real terms over the past two decades. Lecturers now spend hours preparing lessons, marking dissertations, filing paperwork, monitoring students and fending off pushy parents, while also attempting to publish research papers. Even at Oxford there is precious little time for dreaming amid Matthew Arnold's spires. While the average graduate worked 44 hours per week in 2004, academics worked 47 hours per week.

For this they are paid a pittance. Back in the 1960s, an Oxford professor earned as much as a Liverpool football player. But the boom years never reached the campus. Between 1982 and 2001, academic earnings went up by 7 per cent in real terms, whereas average earnings for all full-time employees in Britain went up by 44 per cent. Academics now earn 23 per cent less than lawyers, 24 per cent less than doctors and 49 per cent less than dentists. Having missed out on the boom years, they are now participating in the bust. Universities have been told to cut back even further on original research projects, which are increasingly seen as an extravagance. And despite recent falls, house prices in Oxford and Cambridge mean most can no longer afford to live near the centre. According to the Association of University Teachers, three quarters of academics believe there has been a decline in their status in the past five years alone. No wonder the exodus of postgraduates abroad is higher than any other developed country. When my grandfather, a physicist, was professor at Imperial College before the Second World War, he lived in an eight-bedroom house in Notting Hill that is now worth £20 million. My other grandfather, director of the Cavendish Laboratory after the war, lived in an even more imposing Georgian house in Cambridge that is now a hall of residence.

In the 1950s intellectuals still wanted the prestige - and money - that came with being a successful academic. Now the blockbuster historians, economists and scientists prevail, but if they want to keep up their advances they need to find a subject that has broad appeal rather than concentrating on specialised research on narrow topics. William Hague has admitted that he did no original research for his much admired autobiography of Pitt the Younger. The top-selling history books are mainly spin-offs from television programmes.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian would have struggled if it had been an academic thesis on the changing face of agriculture in the former Soviet Union, but became a bestseller because it started: “Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blond Ukrainian divorcee”. Yet the former subject would have added more to our knowledge.

Who cares? Well, perhaps the future blockbuster writers who will find that there is no one inspirational left to teach them at university. There is little point in sending an ever greater number of young people to rack up debts for three years if they are going to taught by overworked, demoralised, second-raters.

In America academics are sought after in public life. President Obama has crammed his cabinet with intellectuals. His Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, won the Nobel Prize in physics. The director of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers, was a professor at MIT and Harvard. France also has a longstanding connection between public life and academia. Christine Lagarde, the finance minister, worked as a law lecturer, the education minister, Xavier Darcos, was a professor of literature.

Britain was like that once. Lord Annan called the years from 1945 to 1975 the golden age. Academics moved in and out of Whitehall as wise men. C.P. Snow chronicled their moves in his novels. Harold Macmillan became Chancellor of Oxford while still Prime Minister. Rab Butler became Master of Trinity. Harold Wilson, who had been a lecturer at Oxford, stuffed his Cabinet with former Oxford dons.

Yet few ministers now have a doctorate. In Brown's Britain, being clever is equated with being posh and elite. Mr Balls prefers beautician diplomas to Beowolf discussions, he calls for universities to “skill” students rather than educate them.

Britain has prospered during those periods in its history when scientists and thinkers have played a key role in our national life. Queen Elizabeth I was the best-educated woman of her generation. Technological advances drove the industrial revolution. Scientists helped to win two world wars. If we want to replicate that success today, putting senior common rooms rather than dealing floors at the centre of our national life might be a good place to start.

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