The student supporters who helped elevate the party to power must now be wondering, if they weren’t already, what happened to "the kind of changes you and I believe in" that leader Nick Clegg promised the coalition would deliver.

Clearly, as the government is very keen to point out at every opportunity, it has no money, and cutting funding is a necessary evil. But while government-wide spending cuts are estimated to be around 25%, by following Lord Browne’s advice the funding for universities would be slashed by two thirds.

Meanwhile Browne is also calling for the number of places to be increased by 10% over the next three years. Essentially, it would be a step towards privatising the higher education system. It is a move which may benefit the taxpayer and the government but which means students would be paying £7,000 a year for a degree and the universities would be no better off – some even predict that they will have less money.

So the teaching quality that the government is determined to improve will, in fact, suffer. And yet students will be in more debilitating amounts of debt than ever.

Browne’s supposed solution is to raise the threshold at which graduates will start repaying their loans from £15,000 to £21,000. This not only appears to be a disincentive to work but also an acceptance that levels of debt which a generation ago would have been unfathomable to most are now the norm. For the government to be in debt (albeit not the crippling debt with which it currently finds itself) is viable option but for the individual it is not. This distressing situation is surely an indictment of the very concept of tuition fees.

However, Lord Browne’s report not only suggests raising fees but lifting the cap entirely, a proposal which, according to David Willetts, the Tory Universities’ Minister, "puts students in the driving seat". Maybe, but in other words, it would lead not only to the privatisation but also to the marketisation of the university system. Far from "widening access" to higher education, which many key figures in this debate quite rightly want, this ludicrous proposal is paving the way for elitism to once again take a stranglehold of the system and choke any notion of social mobility to which it currently aspires.

If the inevitable debts incurred by a 100% raise in fees to £7,000 are not enough to put prospective students off higher education altogether, the astronomical prices that Oxbridge are hinting at if given free rein will surely discourage many of the brightest students from poorer backgrounds from even considering applying. Browne would reiterate that, as is the case now, no-one will pay until they can afford it, but as a privately educated former chief-executive you have to wonder whether he appreciates what £40,000 of debt means.

Thankfully – although there is still the possibility of the £7,000 limit being a so-called "soft cap", allowing universities to charge more but incur penalties from the treasury by doing so – the Business Secretary Vince Cable has dismissed the idea of allowing a "laissez-faire free market" to develop. There is also no reason not to believe Clegg’s assertion that he "regrets" not being able to deliver his party’s election promise.

On the other hand, there is also no reason to accept that it is not possible to avoid raising tuition fees, especially when the Deputy Prime Minister followed this admission of defeat by announcing a £2.5 billion a year programme to assist the education of the country’s poorest children. Its advantages are unquestionable (and it is, this time, fulfilling an election pledge) but Clegg claims that the goal of the programme is to support disadvantaged children from the age of two to the age of 20 in order that they have a chance "to get ahead, to live out their dreams".

Unfortunately, this does not complement the idea of obliterating funding later on and pricing the same children out of the best universities. While it is vital to this country’s future that our top universities maintain high standards of teaching and research, it is equally vital that these high standards are accessible to all who want them. It must be the government’s job to ensure this.