Universities in England are being warned to expect an 80% cut to their teaching budgets in next week's government spending review. Professor Steve Smith, president of the vice-chancellors' group Universities UK, has emailed all higher education institutions alerting them to a likely £4.2bn cut to teaching and a £1bn reduction in research budgets.

Lord Browne's review of university funding, published this week, states that it envisages the teaching budget dropping to £700m per year. All but medicine, science, engineering and modern languages degrees could stop receiving state subsidies, it said.

Universities will have to charge about £7,000 per year in fees "to maintain investment at current levels," the report said.

In the email, which was leaked to the BBC, Smith states that the Browne review would have been informed of plans for severe cuts. The Browne review set out figures that "confirm our worst fears," Smith wrote.

Cuts on this scale would be four times worse than universities have been expecting. "The biggest worry is simple to state: if Browne fails to get through the Commons, or gets un-picked, or gets accepted but only after major changes are made, we will simply not be able to replace the unprecedented reductions in state funding that are coming in the spending review," Smith told universities.

The lecturers' union, the University and College Union, said cuts on this scale would leave cities and towns "without a local university and our students paying the highest public fees in the world".

A spokesperson for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills said: "This is speculation about what the spending review will contain. Lord Browne made recommendations to government this week on a new funding system. His proposals are for graduates to make a greater contribution to the cost of their education, linked to their ability to pay.

"These recommendations are currently under consideration and are informing our comprehensive spending review negotiations with the Treasury. Ensuring the university sector is properly funded remains a key objective for the government."

Aaron Porter, president of the National Union of Students, said vice-chancellors had been "gleefully rubbing their hands at the prospect of receiving even more money from graduates' pockets.

"At the same time, they have utterly failed in their huge responsibility to defend students, courses and universities that enrich our economy and society."

"The devastating scale of the cuts to publicly-funded degrees planned for next week is laid bare by this admission.

"The true agenda of the coalition government this week is to strip away all public support for arts, humanities and social science provision in universities and to pass on the costs directly to students' bank accounts."

Meanwhile, 40% of GCSE and A-level students said they would reconsider attending university if the Browne review's recommendations to remove the cap on tuition fees were implemented. A poll of 1,254 teenagers on The Student Room website shows 90% believed they would need to work part-time through their degree.