Yesterday, the University and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) announced a sharp drop in the number of university applicants for the first year of £9,000 fees. The official government narrative – that the 9% drop is merely a readjustment for a similar rise in applications for places before the fee rise – is paper thin. In fact, ministers have offered no serious explanation or sense of reflection at all. Most crucially, no analysis has been offered as to who has chosen not to apply, or why.

The reality, as major studies have suggested ever since tuition fees were introduced, is that rocketing tuition fees have pushed bright students from working-class backgrounds away from university.

This is supported by the fact that the biggest drop to occur is among people over the age of 23 – often among the most disadvantaged set of applicants. These mature students are not the Willetts fantasy of "ill-informed" 18-year-olds, failing to understand that debt repayments are income-linked. The fact is that the government is in the process of creating a system driven by consumer choice, in which the rational money-driven decision could be never to apply to university.

The only possible result of this process will be fewer people going to university, or, to put it more accurately, fewer working-class people going to university. For those not fortunate enough to get good grades at a nice secondary school, a degree in some subjects, costing £27,000 before living costs, will result in a net earning loss over your lifetime. Education as a life-enhancing, horizon-broadening experience – even if only inadvertently and in passing – is being snatched away, both by the ideology of the system, and now by debt and post-graduation data.

Even without this process, the result of the government's programme for education will be the systematic exclusion of many of Britain's less affluent prospective students. The market system – put in motion by Labour's introduction of fees and moved to its logical conclusion by the coalition's higher education white paper – will starve newer universities of teaching grants, concentrating wealth into the hands of whatever the market, regulated by the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and mechanisms like it, decides is best.

A quiet cull of "unprofitable" courses has been taking place for some time: students at London Met, Britain's most working-class university, have lost their history and philosophy departments. A report released by the UCU this year found that the number of courses on offer in England has declined by almost a third in four years.

On the surface, course cuts, fees and marketisation, not to mention the abolition of EMA, appear to be the betrayal of a generation; but in truth they stem from a deeper and more typical Tory agenda. The 9% drop in applicants will not be from the sons and daughters of government ministers, whose parents can pay, or whose knowledge of the system and schooling means that they can be assured that university will be a sound investment, not a financial nightmare.

Equally, the winners from the white paper, if there are winners at all, will be "world class" and research-intensive universities. Fees and marketisation may yet boost the global prestige of a handful of Britain's universities, and the collective ego of the likes of universities minister David Willetts and the vice chancellors who inform his thinking, but their broader social implications will be a disaster for the vast majority of ordinary people.

The latest Ucas data is not at its root a lesson in students getting the "wrong information", or the fact that the government's reform programme is often chaotic and dysfunctional, which it is. The truth is that the reforms are having broadly the desired effect: higher education is shrinking and increasingly being privatised, and different tiers of learning are developing – some for the elite, and some for the rest.

The key question as students and trade unions prepare for another autumn of discontent will be "who pays?", and when Ucas releases reports on student numbers, attention is focused on fees. This narrative is in part correct, but if education and other evaporating public services are to be saved, we must also be clear that student numbers are more than statistics; they are the symptoms of a rapidly accelerating class war.

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