So instead of getting £4,000 per student from government for the humanities, £5,000 for the social sciences, £7,000 for the sciences and £16,000 for medicines, the central grant will, it seems, become £0 for humanities and social sciences, £2,000 for science and £11,000 for medicine. The students themselves will contribute the lost £4-5,000. A university will therefore have to charge a fee of more than £7,000 per year simply in order to stand still. To gain the minimum additional £2,000 per year that the review was supposed to elicit, the fee will have to rise to £9,000.

The proposal has been presented in the press as an attack on humanities and social science funding, but that is not how it was intended: the clear implication of the report and the CSR, in which the university teaching grant has been slashed by a whopping 60-70 per cent, is that the basic £4-5,000 of central funding will be removed from all students. As Browne was working on his report, humanities and social science applications were at an all-time high, so he reckoned that there would be no shortage of continuing demand despite the price hike. His priority was to ensure that there would be no price differential that would make it even harder than it is at the moment for universities to recruit able students in science and engineering.

Nor is it the case that all government funding will be removed from the humanities and social sciences. The Higher Education Funding Council distributes £1.5 billion annually for research. This covers all disciplines and is divided up according to universities' performance in the RAE. However, the great bulk of the research income goes to the science departments and the large research-intensive institutions. Smaller and newer universities that receive very limited research funding rely almost entirely on their teaching income from humanities and social science students. It looks as if they will have nothing other than what they can charge in the market place. In that sense, they will have been effectively privatised by the back door. Or they will close — or be taken over by private, for-profit providers.

Browne recommended the outright withdrawal of the fee cap, albeit with an awkward clawback mechanism to prevent excessive charges. In order to save the face of the Business Secretary Vince Cable and the Lib Dems, who have been forced to perform an excruciating U-turn on their election manifesto, Willetts has now announced a normative cap of £6,000 and an "exceptional" one of £9,000. He will presumably come to be known as "two caps" Willetts. Elite institutions will need to earn the right to charge at Cap 2 level by demonstrating improved access for disadvantaged students. Oxbridge has been trying to do this for many years, with limited success. The top universities have effectively been given a term report in this area that says "try even harder". They have the resources to do so.

It is lower down the food chain that the future now looks very uncertain. If there is no central government grant for the lower-band subjects, the result will be a net loss of teaching income combined with a need to offer an improvement in quality commensurate with what will look to the student like doubling (or more) of the price. In such circumstances, the humanities are going to have to work very hard to demonstrate the value for money that they offer to society in general and prospective paying students in particular.