IF I EVER fall upon hard times, I will always have my Cambridge postcode to fall back upon. Fancy a degree from Clark College, Cambridge? I can send it out to you today, from £9.95, including p&p. Wait for my January sale and you can upgrade to a PhD for only £1.95 extra.

My business model won’t please the Quality Assurance Agency, which was complaining yesterday that Britain is becoming a haven for fake universities that are damaging the reputation of genuine institutions. But I’m not sure that my bogus degrees will be much less rigorous than the qualifications issued by some official universities. OK, real universities have lecture halls, libraries and examiners, but what do they count for when higher education has been so pathetic at tackling students who buy their essays over the internet?

If you type “essay crisis” into Google it produces 875,000 results, the most prominent of them websites of companies that are itching to help to take the strain out of university life. “Looking for an essay? We’ve got thousands to download from only £19:95,” boasts one site. “We provide top mark essays for university students, guaranteed 2:1 and 1st class standard,” claims another, adding somewhat ironically, “ all completely original and non-plagiarised”. Astonishingly, it is a business conducted fully in the open. All the companies have to do is to make sure that they add the caveat, “these essays are for research purposes only, and are not for handing in”, somewhere on their site.

Anti-plagiarisation software will never detect essays that are personally written, but by somebody other than the student who claims the credit. The universities could, however, eradicate cheating at a stroke by making students earn all their marks under exam conditions, just as I earned my degree at Cambridge in the 1980s. Yet higher education is going in the opposite direction, with ever more coursework-led degrees.

As for the Government doing anything to stamp out cheating, forget it: this is the same Administration that cut and pasted a large part of one of its dossiers on Saddam Hussein from an old PhD thesis. Thanks to the lowering of standards that has accompanied the Government’s obsession with expanding higher education we will soon reach the stage where even £9.95 will be too much to charge for a degree. They will come in Christmas crackers.