Lord Browne, a crossbench peer and President of the Royal Academy of Engineers, is currently overseeing a Government review into university funding which is expected to recommend changes to tuition fees and a possible increase. Earlier this year, the University of Leicester commissioned a survey of university applicants to examine what might happen if this came to pass.

Higher tuition fees would dissuade some people from applying to university – but not as many as some previous studies had suggested. Increasing the home/EU fees to £7,000 (from their current level of £3,290) would raise the percentage of potential applicants rejecting university from 6.3% to 10.3% if all universities moved to the limit of the cap. These figures were slightly higher among applicants from lower socio-economic groups but the overwhelming majority of students would still seek to attend university.

A stronger trend in the results indicates a ‘flight to perceived quality’. In other words, significantly more people would apply to ‘prestigious’ universities – which could create shortfalls at other universities.

A likely outcome of this ‘flight to quality’ is that those ‘other universities’ would try to compete on price. So instead of pretty much everyone charging the £3,000 maximum across the board, as now, a £7,000 cap could see many courses actually charging considerably less than the maximum in an effort to maintain their share of preferences. This raises the very real possibility of a university price market.

Or rather a course price market, as the survey results indicate that the percentage of applicants deterred by higher fees varies enormously across subjects. Arts and humanities applicants, for example, were more likely to be dissuaded by higher fees than aspiring medical students.

The survey was conducted for the University of Leicester by OpinionPanel, a specialist higher education market research company, who interviewed 730 young people about ten named universities. You can see tabulated results in the press release.

Richard Taylor, the University of Leicester’s Director of Marketing, said:

The University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sir Robert Burgess, added:

The University of Leicester asked our Students’ Union to comment on these results. They said:

Comments on the Newsblog are (for technical reasons) restricted to University of Leicester staff and students but you are welcome to post your views about the mooted fees increase on our Facebook page.

• University press release