Browne was effectively being asked to answer four demands. First, as with Dearing, it was his role to take the issue of university tuition fees out of the election campaign — once again, cross-party agreement on this strategy was the first sign that both major parties knew that regime change would be on its way the following year. Labour and Tory manifestos duly deferred to Browne. Only the Liberal Democrats, assuming that they would never be in government, stuck out their necks, proposing not merely a refusal to raise the cap but the total abolition of tuition fees.

Second, Browne was charged with increasing the amount of money going into universities, which had suffered a severe reduction in their "unit of resource" as enrolment soared. Third, he had to reduce the drain on the public purse represented by the government-owned Student Loans Company that finances tuition fee loans and maintenance grants. And fourth, he was encouraged to introduce some flexibility into the system: this came not only from a renewal of the desire to create an element of market choice (why should a student sitting in a class of 20 pay the same amount as one lucky enough to get a weekly tutorial in a class of two?), but also from a recognition that reliance on direct government funding had led to ridiculous constraints whereby universities endured a draconian financial penalty for recruiting numbers above their centrally imposed quota.

Considered as an attempt to answer these demands, the Browne Report is a lean and coherent piece of work. Its premise is that the students who benefit from higher education should make a substantial retrospective contribution towards the cost of it. Why should the binman and the dinner lady subsidise the cost of educating the lawyer and the surgeon? Salaries of graduates are generally higher than those of non-graduates, so it is fair that some part of this "premium" should be given back in the form of a "graduate contribution" to their education. No fee is to be paid upfront, and payback only begins at a salary of £21,000, a figure 40 per cent higher than that in the current system.

In this regard, the Browne proposals are progressive. Consider how a pair of my old students would have fared had Browne been in place in their day. Both have taken the well-trodden path from an English Literature degree to the acting profession. For one of them, a good year consists of a bit-part appearance in a television drama, a brief stint in provincial rep and some theatre-in-education work with disadvantaged children. Total annual earnings well below the Equity average of £20,000 per year. Threshold for repayment of loan not reached. University education still free. The other student has fared better: she has an Oscar on the shelf, commands more than $1 million per film and has a contract as the face of a major cosmetic line. It seems right that she — rather than the binman and the dinner lady — should pay retrospectively for the three years in which she honed her gifts via student theatricals at Cambridge.

A further progressive element is the proposal to make loans available to part-time students, who typically come from less affluent backgrounds. This will be of huge benefit to that especially rewarding pupil the "mature student" — those who went straight to work (or unemployment) from school, but who seek to improve their lot by applying to university later in life. Since age discrimination is now illegal, Browne also opens up the inviting prospect of a new generation of pensioners getting government loans to undertake part-time degrees (to qualify, their "intensity of study," as Browne calls it, will have to be one-third of a full-time course). There is ample evidence of the beneficial mental health effects of reading and rigorous thinking. A splendid unintended consequence of Browne might be a reduction in the NHS's horrendous bill for dementia treatment. And most pensioners would be unlikely to reach the £21,000 threshold before they die, so they would get their belated degrees for nothing.

Browne proposes that students may pay different fees at different institutions. Whereas John Major homogenised higher education provision, allowing polytechnics and teacher-training colleges to turn themselves into universities competing for research funding, the post-Browne environment will be highly diverse. In the US, differential fees have created a successful mixed ecology. There are two-year community colleges that provide excellent vocational training, "liberal arts" colleges that offer a rounded undergraduate education as a route into the professions, and full-scale research universities with doctoral programmes and major scientific grants. Each kind of institution seeks to foster a particular kind of excellence, and the best in each kind are highly respected by their students and their communities. It is not a bad model.