The Coalition is considering reintroducing a cap on university places despite emphatically ruling it out last year while in opposition.

The minister for education, Christopher Pyne, has confirmed he is considering reintroducing the cap on university places as well as abolishing the compulsory fee paid by students to fund campus services and scrapping the targets that were introduced by Labor to allow more disadvantaged students to enter university.

Pyne last year rejected reports that the Coalition would reintroduce university caps if they won government.

"Reports that this is being considered are wrong. In fact, the Coalition strongly supported the uncapping of university place," Pyne said at the time.

"While we welcome debate over the quality and standards in our universities, we have no plans to increase fees or cap places."

He repeated his claim that the Coalition would not cap university places in July this year on ABC's 7.30 report saying: "We have no plans to restore the cap. We do believe that the more students who are doing university, the better. But we do need to address concerns in the industry that there is a diminution of quality."

After Kevin Rudd became prime minister in June his innovation minister, Kim Carr, flagged capping university places as part of a review of cuts to the sector.

In interviews with both Fairfax Media and News Corp Australia newspaper the Australian, Pyne flagged re-introducing caps saying he would review whether the uncapping of places was impacting the quality of a university education.

Labor uncapped the number of Commonwealth funded university places leading to 190,000 more students being able to attend university.

Interim opposition leader Chris Bowen criticised Pyne's decision to review capping university places saying the Labor party was proud to have allowed hundreds of thousands more students into universities.

"To abolish the demand driven system would be a blow to Australian regional universities, to Australian Catholic University, to universities right across the country that have been important in driving this massive expansion in university allocations," he said.

"Now this is a clear breach of commitment from the Liberal Party...they've been in office a week and we see them walking away from core commitments; we see them walking away from their promises."

The Labor government also introduced targets for almost half of 25 to 34-year-olds to hold a university degree by 2025 and increasing the university participation rates of students from low-socio economic backgrounds to 20% by 2020.

Pyne has said he will scrap both targets along with the student union-style compulsory fee introduced in 2011 to help pay for student services. The fee was introduced after the Howard government switched to voluntary student unionism in 2005.

The fee was used to pay for services such as on campus childcare and student newspapers.

The Regional Universities Network executive director, Caroline Perkins, said regional universities would suffer the most from proposed changes with services on campus suffering and regional students denied a place in university.

The Coalition is also planning to introduce legislation proposed by the Gillard government which would result in $2bn worth of savings on university spending.

Former prime minister Julia Gillard introduced the policy to help pay for the Gonski school funding reforms but it is not clear where the Coalition will direct the money.

Pyne's office has been contacted for comment.