Bang for our bucks

Roger Brown ("Inequality? You ain't seen nothing yet", Letters, 30 August) identifies Edge Hill University as the worst funded higher education institution in the UK. There are specific reasons for this, primarily related to the fact that we are a major provider of low-fee, low-grant, part-time postgraduate taught education, with more than 10,000 teachers following the university's higher degree and professional development programmes.

Further, while accepting the basic tenet of Brown's hypothesis, there is no perfect linear relationship between income and institutional capacity. This is evidenced by Edge Hill producing consistent and sizeable surpluses for reinvestment, a £200 million capital programme and strong positive movement in the league tables, plus being shortlisted for the Times Higher Education University of the Year Award three times since 2007.

John Cater, Vice-chancellor, Edge Hill University