Last week’s essay about universities (“Have England’s universities been privatised by stealth?”, New Review 12 October) was an exercise in nostalgia: the big photograph from the 1970s was the clue. The truth is that we now have more students getting a better funded education with more attention to the quality of the teaching than ever before. This is an extraordinary achievement in an age of austerity. It is only possible because graduates, not students, will be paying back the cost of their education through the income tax system if they are in well-paid jobs and can afford to do so. This is a progressive policy spreading educational opportunity and funding it on a fair basis.

The article talked of students having to “pay” and “debt”,“default” and their “gamble” on getting a job to pay back. But the student loan scheme introduced by Labour and extended by us is nothing like a commercial loan. Graduates pay back via PAYE on earnings above £21,000 at a rate of 9%. So if they are earning £25,000 they pay back £30 a month. Including basic income tax of 20%, they face a combined rate of 29%. In the 1970s they would have been paying a basic rate of income tax of 35% as soon as they got into work.

The article then had some rather miserable views about graduate jobs. It is true that graduates aren’t always in graduate jobs after six months – the very short period covered by most of the data. But they go on to enjoy a considerable graduate premium because employers want well-educated people.

Fifty years ago, 5% of young people went to university; now it is close to 50%. Throughout that time, pessimists have warned that the graduate premium would fall, but it has remained remarkably positive and stable. It is hard to get a well-paid job in the modern labour market if you have not got some higher education or really good technical training as part of an apprenticeship. The Observer is always calling for a hi-tech, high-investment country; investing in more graduates is part of that.

In the old days, people would be turned away from university because the government rationed access. The coalition can be very proud of having removed that cap on aspiration. And all students brings with them the funding to pay for their education, so quality of teaching should not suffer.

Going to university is worthwhile in its own right. It deepens our understanding and broadens the mind. But for some people going to university is mainly a transaction to get a well-paid job. The great Robbins report of 1963 put it like this: “Confucius said in the Analects that it was not easy to find a man who had studied for three years without aiming at pay. We deceive ourselves if we claim that more than a small fraction of students in institutions of higher education would be where they are if there were no significance for their future careers in what they hear and read; and it is a mistake to suppose that there is anything discreditable in this.” So caring about employability is not new and not the betrayal of some previous golden age of innocence.

The article worried that our policies are “marketisation”. Incumbents, protected behind their barriers, always use this argument against the new guys. Coleridge denounced Bentham’s University College London, the first alternative to the Oxbridge monopoly, as a “mere lecture bazaar”. But it is right that students should be able to choose what and where to study – subject of course to academic standards. It is what Ucas – UCCA in the 1970s – is all about. The only difference now is that we have got rid of the controls on numbers at each individual university so now more students get their first choice.

There is no reason why a system that claims to let you choose and then limits it so you get your second or third choice is morally superior to one in which you have a better chance of your first choice. Quite the reverse.

As well as this choice, we also have a proper recognition of the public value of what universities do. The taxpayer funds extra costs of high-cost subjects. We provide maintenance on a scale no other country manages. And yes, if people cannot afford it, we do not collect back what they owe. That adds up to a lot of public support for universities because they do have a public value – just as they did in the 1970s.

David Willetts MP served in cabinet as minister for universities and science, 2010-2014.