Students are increasingly having to choose their higher education according to a financial return on investment. This will increase the divide between liberal learning and vocational training, says Gemma Tumelty, president of the National Union of Students.
The latest Ucas figures show that applications have risen again, and that England is doing better than other parts of the UK.
But it's vital that we get beneath the surface. The introduction of top-up fees has not, mercifully, led to a decline in applications. It remains to be seen whether they will cause, in the longer term, a decline of aspiration among the already disadvantaged.
More young people than ever before are applying for courses in higher education, despite the huge costs involved, and the size of the debt they will incur. This can only be a very good thing. But now we need to ask: what are these additional students going to study, and where are they going to do it?
It simply isn't possible to make such a substantial change to the way that higher education is funded without expecting to cause an impact on its structure, and the principal implication of top-up fees is that students must increasingly make judgments about value for money.
They will do this by comparing their ambitions to the amount of cash they invest. The government is determined to give them that choice. Through last week's data, we are beginning to see how individuals' decisions about the amount they invest in their own education will cause the sector to become yet more stratified.
Foundation degree applications are up by more than 20%, while applications to do full honours degrees in the Russell Group are falling, especially from candidates from non-traditional backgrounds.
As these trends continue, a wider market in provision will open up, in which the choices to be made aren't continuous and flexible, but instead polarised, stringent, and limited.
Underlying it all, we see Leitch's prescription for a huge increase in the number of adults with a level four attainment, lifting the rate to 40% by 2020. There's just one problem: not all of them can afford it.
I'm worried that if these effects continue, we'll see a sector develop where the matriculating student finds liberal learning and honours on one side of town, and vocational training and foundations on the other. Which one they plump for will depend chiefly on the depth of their pockets.
Whisper it so that nobody hears you: the binary divide is back.
