Professor Arorťs article in the spring number of Minerva 1 gives an excellent analysis of some of the major stresses in the French university system; it seems, however, to leave a number of issues untouched and it recommends no very definite course of action. It is hardly an Englishman's business to make suggestions for France. Nonetheless, we in England, starting from different premises, have arrived at similar difficulties which might be more easily solved if a thorough-going comparative study were made of the situations in the two countries. The French have a national, centralised system of university education and, in theory, they take in any student with the minimum qualifications. Most students do not appear to receive an adequate subsistence grant, unless they win a place at one of the grandes ecoles , and so they depend on the good will of their parents or have to work. In England, we have universities which, in spite of being largely financed from the centre, enjoy some degree of independence and selfgovernment and, in particular, retain the right to choose their students individually; these students are, if necessary, supported by public funds. As I watch both systems trying to cope with the strains of expansion, certain thoughts bother me that I do not often hear voiced and it may be worth expressing them, if only to have them effectively refuted. I offer them merely as a few preliminary reflections. Professor Aron, being himself the most brilliant type of normalien , accepts without question the principle of the creation of elites through education. His concern is with the continued selection of such elites, in the face of an extension of educational possibilities beyond the ruling middle class to the whole nation. In England, it is now constantly assumed that anyone who is going to be of any importance at all will have a university education and there is still a tendency to think, even in the new universities, that this education should have some of the traditional social characteristics of Oxford or Cambridge. But perhaps we should ask ourselves whether the various elites we are trying to produce are all of the same fundamental kind.