The accountants Grant Thornton (GT) do a welcome and nice piece of pro bono work by analysing the annual accounts of the UK's 160 (sic) HEIs and compiling a report on "The Financial Health of the Higher Education Sector"--this year entitled "The calm before the storm"! GT duly note that, if the US Department of Education's "ratio-based methodology" were applied to the UK HEIs, 104 of them would "fare well" under this way of assessing "the financial condition" of universities and colleges, while a not insignificant thirty-four would require "careful monitoring" and a worrying twenty-two "would be barred from Federal funding programmes". However, GT warn of the gathering storm clouds: notably the uncertainty over the recruitment of Home/EU undergraduates as the higher fees kick in, the impact on overseas student numbers of the UK Border Agency's increasingly stringent policy on (not) awarding immigration visas, and the massive cost of eventually having to catch up with a long-term backlog of infrastructure maintenance and ageing buildings. Thus, GT sees UK HE as "entering a period of uncertainty" in which Government HE policy will have "potentially devastating consequences" and in which some HEIs "may find it difficult to survive as autonomous bodies".