UNIVERSITIES have decided that they would like to make more money rather than less.

After being given the task of setting how much money they would like to be given for reading through a 25 year-old set of notes to a half-full room of hungover teenagers, over two-thirds said they would like as much as was legally possible.

Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute For Studies, said: “We now need to look more closely at the establishments that didn’t go for the nine grand. There may be simpletons afoot.

“We ran this whole fees thing past our economics research team and they drew this big graph with a zero at one end and ‘9,000’ at the other end and the list of stuff you could buy at the 9,000 end was at least twice as long.

“And when it came to the student debt burden the team drew another graph that just had the words ‘not our fucking problem, chief’ written on it. So that was fine.”

Many have voiced surprise that the cost of educating students should turn out to be exactly £9,000, regardless of the course they are attending, the geographical location of their college or the existing facilities available to the university.

Professor Brubaker added: “This misses the crucially important point that most senior staff in higher education like very long holidays in Italy.”

Education secretary Michael Gove has promised to look at the number of universities charging the maximum fees, but only after Vince Cable patiently explains to him what the term ‘captive market’ means a couple of million times.