The Government's latest report on post-18 education funding is a very good piece of work. Dr Philip Augar and his panel make some important recommendations, and they could not come soon enough. The current system of student fees and loans is broken. It has led to grotesque increases in vice-chancellors’ salaries at the weakest universities, a proliferation of courses delivering poor graduate salaries, and students left with enormous unpayable loans. It also imposes a hidden burden on the taxpayer big enough to bend the national accounts out of shape.

In the last seven years, vice-chancellors’ salaries have increased by almost £50,000. Now 124 earn more than £150,000 as a basic salary. Annual extra payments, such as awards and pension contributions, can reach an additional £350,000. Frankly, I do not object to them being paid more than the PM... providing they do the job properly. But high pay does not deliver high performance. Graduates from institutions awarding vice-chancellors the biggest pay rises have earnings more than £4,000 less than students from more fiscally responsible universities. This is madness.

Worse is the behaviour of some of the weaker universities. As it stands, tuition fees for most are £9,250 per annum. Some courses cost much more than that to deliver, notably medicine, engineering and natural sciences. On the other hand, courses such as creative arts or social media studies can be cheaply provided with as little as four hours contact time a week. Since students still pay £9,250, they are very profitable for the universities.

But such courses do not generally lead to high income careers. Median earnings for men who graduated in medicine in 1999 had reached almost £60,000 by 2012-13 but in creative arts and similar only about £20,000. Young students are led to believe that going to university is the gateway to a well-paid career. Plainly in many cases it is not.

It gets even worse. Some universities make offers that do not require any A-level results at all, but seek to lock the student into making an early choice and to then rest on their laurels. These “lock-in” unconditional offers are designed to attract paying students to uncompetitive universities. In 2013, there were no such offers. In 2018, there were over 66,000. The Education Secretary will undoubtedly put a stop to this, but we should recognise that this has been incentivised by a bad policy in the first place.