For anyone hoping to get into university, this year’s wait for A-level results has been a little less nerve-racking than normal.

Applications for degree courses are significantly down. Britain’s most prestigious universities have been left with thousands of unfilled places and even teenagers falling well short of the grades they hoped for have been given a second chance.

Good news for them, perhaps. But what does this say about the state of our elite institutions, the universities at the supposed pinnacle of our education system?

Applications for degree courses are way down, perhaps because colleges have become seminaries of politically correct nonsense which suppress incorrect facts and stifle debate

And why is it that a poll last week suggests this is no blip but part of a long-term trend?

According to the respected Sutton Trust, which aims to improve social mobility, notably fewer schoolchildren now expect to go to university than a decade or so ago.

The answer, I’m afraid is troubling. First, it is increasingly clear the universities system is no longer a machine for guaranteeing future wealth and status, as the thousands of graduates in humdrum jobs, or no job at all, know only too well.

More than half of graduates don’t use their degree in their current work and, despite the official orthodoxy, the truth is that they have increasing difficulty finding any kind of employment.

In contrast, vacancies in skilled professions are at an all-time high and are projected to increase after we leave the EU and can no longer rely on importing skilled labour.

Perhaps that is why it has begun to dawn on school-leavers that a university place is not the only route forwards. Why spend three years doing media studies at a second-rate university when you could find a better-paid job after getting a qualification in a skilled occupation at a further education college – and without a debt of £50,000? The trebling of tuition fees has hardly helped.

But there is another, more insidious reason why applications are falling, which is that our colleges have become seminaries of politically correct nonsense – Left-wing madrassas whose purpose is not to disseminate knowledge and promote understanding but to suppress politically incorrect facts and stifle debate.

Colleges have become seminaries of politically correct nonsense

One of the reasons Tony Blair was so keen to expand Britain’s universities – despoiling market towns with thousands of additional students in the process – was that he hoped to produce a new generation of instinctive Labour voters. He wanted half of all school-leavers to attend college, knowing that many would come under intense pressure to toe the progressive line in institutions which had already become little more than dogmatic hothouses.

It’s no secret that the overwhelming majority of British academics are Left-of-centre. A survey carried out by the Times Higher Education Supplement in 2015 found that 46 per cent of university employees intended to vote Labour, 22 per cent were Green supporters and only 11 per cent were Conservatives.

A vanishingly small 0.4 per cent said they intended to vote for Ukip – even though the party polled 12.6 per cent of the popular vote in that year’s General Election.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that a recent survey found that 68 per cent of undergraduates support Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour – the highest ever recorded student backing for the party – while Conservative support has crashed to 15 per cent, down from 42 per cent a decade ago.

This dominance of the Left in university departments – particularly in the arts and humanities, where the number of Conservative supporters falls to five per cent – means that students who don’t subscribe to liberal orthodoxy can feel isolated.

Think of the rampant identity politics that has seen demands for the removal of memorials to long-dead ‘imperialists’ such as Cecil Rhodes, whose statue stands at Oriel College, Oxford. Or the mural of Rudyard Kipling’s poem If in Manchester University’s students’ union building, defaced on the grounds that the Nobel Prize-winning author was a ‘white supremacist’. Or the hounding of Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar by his academic colleagues for daring to suggest the British empire wasn’t an unmitigated evil. Apparently, he should not have drawn attention to the Royal Navy’s century-long suppression of the Atlantic slave trade.

Feminist Germaine Greer and gay rights activist Peter Tachell, both of whom have been denounced by students of today

Add to this the vipers’ nest that is student politics, with its vigilant policing of thought crimes, such as ‘Islamophobia’, ‘transphobia’ and ‘ableism’ – although not anti-Semitism, which has become a defining characteristic of the Corbynite Left – and the aggressive no-platforming of anyone with Right-of-centre political views, and is it any wonder that some smart school-leavers have decided that going to university is just not worth it?

We HAVE seen the treatment meted out to dissenters – not least to those undergraduates who dared to vote Brexit and were brave enough to say so – and the violent protest against Jacob Rees-Mogg when he attempted to give a speech at the University of the West of England.

Other speakers who’ve been targeted by ‘anti-fascist’ student mobs include, bizarrely, the feminist Germaine Greer, the gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, and Dr Adam Perkins, a lecturer at King’s College London who was prevented from giving a talk at his own university’s students’ union entitled ‘The Scientific Importance of Free Speech’.

The rise of identity politics on Britain’s campuses – with enforced speech codes, ‘safe spaces’ and prohibitions on views likely to ‘trigger’ anxiety in others – has meant that white students, particularly heterosexual males who are comfortable with their own biological gender, have been made to feel increasingly guilty.

As if they are somehow responsible for the evils of colonialism, slavery, racial inequality and the rest.

Last year, applications to British universities from 18-year-olds in most ethnic groups increased, but applications from 18-year-old whites fell by two per cent. And this year, 36,000 fewer men applied than women.

In America, liberal-arts colleges with a reputation for white-bashing and anti-free-speech protests have already seen a steady decline in enrolments – and the more liberal the university, the greater the fall in student numbers.

How ironic it would be, then, if those same zealots for ‘social justice’, the vanguard of Labour’s bid to build a permanent Leftist majority, were to end up crippling the madrassas in which so much of its political capital – and so much of our money – has been permanently sunk.