In the UK, Lord Browne recently reported on the higher education system. In the words of Stefan Collini, Browne ‘wants to see a system in which the universities are providers of services, students are the (rational) consumers of those services, and the state plays the role of the regulator’. Under Browne’s scheme, ‘students will judge the value of HE in terms of “the employment returns from their courses”. Courses that lead to higher earnings will be able to charge higher fees. According to Browne ‘education matters because it helps create the knowledge, skills and values that underpin a civilised society’(Browne, p.1). This paper will show how Hannah Arendt’s writings on love and on the authority of the teacher can be used to offer a deep, challenging critique of Browne’s policy in the UK (Arendt). The approach to education Arendt inveighs against is a narrow instrumentalism, an approach that imagines that education is centrally about imparting the skills needed to work in the marketplace of the day. Whilst this is important, education ought also to be to be pursued for its own sake. Higher education for its own sake would carry humanity towards the a better world; towards the good.