Market forces

In the end it all comes down to price, the more expensive it is, the less likelihood anyone will use it. And thus we come to the situation of University top up fees, where there's now a predicted shortfall of 5,000 students applying to universities across the UK, although universities maintain this may drop before the end of the year.
Telegraph.

The number of students applying to university has dropped by 5,000 in a year following warnings over a decline in graduate job prospects.
Figures from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) show that the overall number of applications from British students is down by four per cent so far this academic year.
The disclosure came on the day that the Government announced it was cutting £100 million from the National Scholarship Programme – a fund for poor students.
It also follows the publication of figures from the Office for National Statistics showing that half of recent graduates are working in jobs that do not require degree-level qualifications.
But university leaders dismissed the figures today, insisting that they were not a “particularly useful indicator of final demand”.

All this is down to the Labour Party's insistence on everyone should have a degree nonsense which totally devalued the standard of a degree and left many students up to their necks in debt when they finally got one. You see in leftard eyes, universities were elitist, and sought to give everyone the same opportunity. A sort of comprehensive style education disaster at a far higher level. That many universities actually had to put in place courses to upgrade students to even take a degree was ignored. Nor was the irony of a lot of employers demanding degree candidates to do jobs that an average O Level student could do seen as a massive flaw by those in charge of the ridiculous scheme.
Well the chickens have come home to roost, people are now saying no thank you to massive debt and somehow I doubt that the cuts in the National Scholarship Program were culpable for the downturn either.
For a lot of jobs, people simply don't need degrees, particularly degrees in useless subjects such as flower arranging, The Beatles, or even media studies come to that. What they simply need are the correct qualifications necessary to to the role involved, normally that isn't a degree, simply experience on top of an O Level.
Socialists have successively wrecked the education system in this country aided ably by ignorant Tories too scared to put right what has gone wrong. Only our top 10% ought to be going to Uni and they should be going with full grants, all others education ends with A levels, with work related courses paid for by employers available for apprenticeships and the like.
Sadly though I doubt the rot can be undone, not without going back to basics and tearing the corrupt edifices of higher education down and our politicians simply won't do that...