The deadline for applications has passed and the final figures are out: after rising for years, the number applying for university places has fallen this year. There are 4% fewer from England and 5% fewer from the EU, with a 2% rise from elsewhere.

Now that a degree leaves students up to £69,000 in debt, with 70% never earning enough to pay it all back, maybe the surprise is that few school leavers have been deterred. A graduate still earns around 35% more than a non-graduate. But averages deceive. While the number from poorer backgrounds hasn’t fallen, dispiriting new research finds that even after gaining a degree from a good university, those from poorer backgrounds, without the connections or the money to take internships, fare worse in jobs.

The Paired Peers project, which followed a cohort of students from Bristol University and the University of the West of England, found that their family’s social class still counted most, whichever university they attended.

The new figures contain two great shocks. While the number of 18-year-olds applying has stayed flat, the big fall is in mature students: those with families and obligations are the ones who have been deterred by the huge cost. Meanwhile, the number of part-time students has dropped by 56% since 2010, two years before their fees were raised to £6,750. The Open University, that great giver of second chances, has lost 30% of its students since 2010. It reckons that in all over the past 10 years, 400,000 people who would have studied part-time in higher education have been deterred from doing so.

In a country that wrings its hands over its lack of skills, it makes no sense to set fees that block mature students. These are the people who know exactly what degree they need for what job, to upskill themselves.

The second great shock, which simply defies belief, is the 19% slump in the number applying for nursing places this year, the first year when nursing students pay full fees and lose their bursaries. That is despite spending half their training time providing useful service to the NHS.

You have to pinch yourself to believe the idiocy of this government, which cut the number of nurse training places as soon as it came to power. By 2015 Health Education England was training 3,100 a year fewer than a decade ago, a 19% cut, the lowest output of nurses in recent times. Last year Jeremy Hunt boasted there were 10,000 more nurses under his government – but they were imported from abroad. Now, since the Brexit vote, the number arriving from the EU has fallen by 96%.

Janet Davies, head of the Royal College of Nursing, warns that nurses’ attitudes will alter once they are paying heftily for their training: “They will demand better clinical placements and their relationship with the NHS will change: carrying a heavy debt to get qualified, they will feel less obligation to work in the NHS.” The government promised that imposing fees on trainee nurses would see an increase of 10,000 new training places; none have been provided.

For the first time, more nurses are leaving the register than joining it, and 40,000 vacancies are unfilled. In a downward spiral, the lack of staff means more work for those who stay – so they, too, leave as workloads soar.

The collapse in numbers willing to take on a huge student debt for the privilege of training in the NHS should come as no surprise, when pay is so low few will ever pay it off. As the House of Lords debates the 1% pay cap on public servants, remember that in real terms nurses have lost 14% of pay since 2010, an average of £3,000.

What keeps many nurses in the NHS is the chance to learn new specialisms. But here again, Health Education England, faced with an acute shortage of specialist A&E, intensive care, diabetes, mental health and community nurses, appears to have taken leave of its senses: it has just cut post-registration specialist training places by 45%.

Wherever you look in the public sector, the wonder is how many public servants soldier on under heavier workloads and fewer rewards. But the wrecking ball taken to nursing defies every rule of political common sense. Labour’s election manifesto turned the cost of degrees into the hottest issue, but deterring people from becoming nurses is a double-whammy act of political self-harm.

Polly Toynbee’s new book, Dismembered: How the attack on the state harms us all, co-authored by David Walker, is available at the Guardian Bookshop

• This article was amended on 19 July 2017. An earlier version said that applications to nursing courses was down by 23%. That is true for the number of people in England applying to train as a nurse. The latest figures from Ucas put the number of England and EU applications down by 19%.

