By creating a market for universities, the government has snookered itself

Shortsighted politicians are reaping the consequences of an unsustainable market in higher education that they themselves created

The government has a problem. Open any newspaper or turn on the news and there are items about the cost of universities and the burden of debt on students, at levels higher than the cost of most of their parents' first house.

People are complaining about universities at a time when the present government thought it had the issue sorted. The creation of a full-blown market for higher education with its own regulator - the Office for Students - heralded by the recent Higher Education and Research Act, is now nearly complete. The theory was that competition amongst the hundred or more existing universities, and a raft of new commercial providers, would hone the system to perfection.