Instead of making baseless accusations against the best universities, he should ask why so many ropey ones are now charging the top £9,000-a-year fee – and ask whether his education market, only a few years old, is already broken.

Student protests are growing. A recent Which? study into universities found that three quarters of them are are breaching consumer law by failing to provide prospective students with basic information.

A third of students say that they would have chosen a different course, had they had know what things would be like. About the same proportion describe their fees as very poor, or poor, value for money.

Behind such statistics are tens of thousands of young people, who have been lured deep into debt and are unable to escape.

The solution is better disclosure: students need to be told more about what they’re buying. This week’s IFS study into gradate earnings is only possible because, when David Willetts was running university policy, he arranged for researchers to be given access to tax return data.

There’s no reason, now, why such studies cannot now be conducted for every course on every university. If the data is published then every student can see whether or not their course leads to higher pay.