Privatising the universities

So. This news story - about off-quota university places, i.e. places for people "who meet the required standards" but are able to afford to pay their fees upfront in full without loans - has been doing the rounds.

And I've just had a nasty little thought about it.

A few weeks ago I was working on the college telephone campaign (mea culpa, I know). The college Bursar said many horrible and irrelevant things during our training, and one horrible (and horribly) relevant one: he believes that Cambridge will end up going private, and other universities will follow suit, finishing up with a US-style system of higher education.

(When I say "he believes", what I mean is: I understand that he sits on several of the university-wide steering committees on financial issues, strongly supports privatisation, and is unsettlingly likely to be listened to, given the fantastic job he's been doing with the college endowment.)

Seems to me that the fury over "allowing rich students to buy places" is potentially a carefully-orchestrated smokescreen: it's a nice safe way to ease universities and their student body into accepting the idea of purchasing places - conveniently over roughly the same timescale that my Bursar thinks will be needed to convince the die-hard left-wing academics that this is the Way of the Future.

What am I missing?