The decade-long experiment in turning universities into market-driven businesses whose success depends, like a cut-price airline’s, on student bums on lecture seats, looks likely to claim its first casualties.

This will come as no surprise to anyone in the sector. It shouldn’t even surprise ministers, but it should be a nasty shock for them. The system of 18+ education that has emerged since 2010 is turning into a national catastrophe.

True, it has expanded the number of 18-year-olds going to university. But the number of graduates in non-graduate work has also risen. The half of school leavers who don’t go to university have been left behind like baggage lost in the handling bay. Employers cannot fill jobs that need engineering or technical skills. And a great burden of student debt is growing behind a wall of trickery (a “pyramid of fiscal illusions”, as one report called it), which will land heavily on the shoulders of future generations.

No one was persuaded that removing the student cap after 2012 and ramping up tuition fees would be a triumph for market fundamentalism, not least because market theory assumes perfect information of the kind rare among school leavers. There are also factors that no amount of genius can influence, like – to take a random, yet significant input – demography. Fewer babies were born in 2000 than in previous years, and fewer still in 2001 and 2002. So the number of school leavers is down this year, and it will go lower before it starts to pick up from 2021.

Some universities – the once-troubled London Met is one example – have responded by recruiting more mature students, but the prospect of accruing thousands of pounds of debt only grows less appealing with age. It’s no surprise that there has been a surge in universities trying to tempt the best students with low grade demands or even unconditional offers of places.

At the same time, Theresa May’s hostile environment has, just as it was meant to, made Britain a less appealing place for foreign students. The refusal to grant short-stay work visas for graduating students is another disincentive. Universities UK claims that if the numbers of students from abroad had continued to grow at the same rate as in Australia or Canada, the British economy would be £8bn stronger. Meanwhile, there are more universities than ever. Demand is down, supply is up. Something has to give.

Ministers have always acknowledged that any market needs what the former universities minister Jo Johnson once called “scope for market exit”. It sounds so painless. But wherever failure falls, Cumbria or Solent or somewhere in between, it will be a brutal experience. In the knowledge economy, universities bring jobs, investment, energy and purpose into the local economy. Consider Northampton, where the county council is effectively bankrupt and where hopes are pinned on its expanding university. While no one is naming the institutions that are at risk of bankruptcy – rightly, for there are probably a score of candidates, and to name them would be to condemn them – the odds are stacked against the smaller, more local institutions in economically stressed English towns and cities.

The old Higher Education Funding Council, Hefce, had powers to strong-arm mergers between vulnerable institutions. The new Office for Students has a student protection package in place, but that will be small comfort for those who’ve just started at a university that might have to shut down before they get to the end of their course, and it will do no good at all to the community that has invested so much in what is, after all, their public institution.

In February, Theresa May – urgently seeking an answer to Labour’s astute but flawed offer of abolishing tuition fees – announced a review of all 18-plus education.

Here’s what the future should look like: every school leaver should have access to a lifelong education and training bursary which could be used for anything from part-time vocational training to full-time degree-level studies, at institutions validated on the strength of their academic offer, not just on their students’ prejudices. The bursary could be made more progressive by adding means-tested maintenance grants, and students could be given incentives to choose shortage subjects, such as nursing or teaching.

Britain’s higher education system is not a research project into the limits of the market. It is a source of world-leading research and also of urgently needed skilled workers and technicians. At every level, from the members of the global elite, the Imperials, Cambridges and Oxfords, to Lincoln’s groundbreaking co-operation with Siemens and Hereford’s embryonic New Model in Technology & Engineering, these are places of innovation as well as education, a precious well of community empowerment and opportunity. They have a public value that goes far beyond the number of students they can recruit. And that is what should be at the heart of the government’s review.

• Anne Perkins is a former deputy political editor of the Guardian