Mr Chris Patten told an educator's conference that it was 'intolerable' that the British government barred Oxford and other universities from charging students more than about £3,000 (S$7,600) a year for their schooling, pointing out that top British private schools charged that amount many times over.

'Can there be a middle class objection to higher fees?' Mr Patten said on Tuesday, according to a copy of his speech posted to Oxford's website.

'It is surely a mad world in which parents or grandparents are prepared to shell out tens of thousands of pounds to put their children through private schools to get them in to universities, and then object to them paying a tuition fee of more than £3,000 when they are there.'

Oxford shares the top of the British academic pyramid with its rival Cambridge - but the endowment commanded by the English-speaking world's oldest university is small compared to billions at the disposal of American Ivy League heavyweights.

Harvard, for example, has an endowment of US$34.9 billion (S$50 billion) - nearly six times Oxford's £3.4 billion.

The disparity is mirrored, too, in the amount US students pay for their education: Tuition at Harvard is US$32,557 for the 2008-2009 academic year, according to the university's website.

The average annual price of a four-year American private education was US$23,712 in 2007-2008, according to the US College Board.

Even public universities in the United States cost more, on average, than the fee charged by Oxford: US$6,185 a year for four-year institutions, according to the College Board.

Mr Patten said the extra cost translated to extra resources, adding that the disparity in spending was degrading the standings of British universities, leaving many of their postgraduate positions underfunded and putting them 'at a significant disadvantage in comparison with our American peers.'

Oxford has recently launched an aggressive fundraising drive to help make up the shortfall, but it has also lobbied to raise the amount of money it charges students for its classes - a move resisted by Britain's left-leaning Labour government, which has made increasing the number of low-income students at the nation's top universities one of its priorities.

Opponents of higher fees argue that, unlike expensive American universities, Britain's elite institutions receive significant amounts of public funding: Oxford and Cambridge received a combined total of about £350 million in taxpayer money for 2008-2009, according to figures put out by the Higher Education Funding Council for England.

Some, like the National Union of Students, also say that a fee increase would leave graduates crushed by debt.

'It is astonishing that, in the middle of a credit crunch, Chris Patten is proposing that hardworking families pay even more towards the cost of higher education,' the union's president Wes Streeting said in a statement.

Mr Patten did not say what he thought the new fees should be.

Neither was he eager to call for end to government support, something he said would spark 'real political war about the relationship of some of our universities to the rest of society.'

'What I hope we can do is to avoid being driven in this direction,' he said. -- AP