British law students are in for a rough ride, it seems. The Financial Times reported yesterday that top universities are losing money at an astounding rate, pointing to huge deficits in the funding they receive from the government and the actual cost of education.

This reminded me of a letter I received a while back from Bill Bryson, the American author. Not a personal letter, mind, but a blanket letter to all alumni of Durham University, of which he is the senior don. He cut to the chase fairly quickly: ‘Please give us money because we don’t have enough.’ He also kindly suggested that Oxbridge alumni are rather more generous when it comes to donations.

But does his cash call, and the cash call issued by the universities yesterday, mean that the quality of education in British universities has already slipped because of a lack of funds? And if this is the case, will employers in the ultra-competitive legal market (and especially in the City) shun British graduates and turn instead to foreign law graduates?

At the end of last year, Professor Alan Riley, director of the LLM programme at The City Law School, said he had been telling international students to apply for jobs with US firms or go in-house because recruitment practices at English firms favoured UK candidates.

This February the Gazette reported that south-west firm Osborne Clarke fell foul of the Employment Appeal Tribunal for automatically rejecting overseas students needing a work permit who applied for training contracts with the firm (specifically, those from outside the European Economic Area, or EEA). It had claimed it would be unable to sign a declaration in the work permit application that it knew of no suitable EEA worker who would be displaced as a result of employing the applicant.

Did Osborne Clarke’s policy reflect a culture among some law firms to concentrate on British graduates, and perhaps graduates from inside the EEA? Riley seemed to think so. But if the government and we university alumni don’t address this apparent funding deficit, then where else will there be to look for top-quality graduates but overseas?