One of the poll questions explained the loans system, which sees graduates start repayments once they earn over £21,000, asking: “Regardless of whether or not you support the cost of university degrees being paid through tuition fees, do you think a university education is or is not worth £9,000 a year?”

Just 29 per cent of respondents said it was worth the money, 56 per cent said it was not, and 15 per cent were not sure.

Pretty loose wording here, particularly the headline.

The cost of the tuition (and all the associate magubbins provided by the university) will be £9,000 per year, or £27,000 in total.

The cost of a degree is far higher, since it includes a load of other stuff including accommodation, the opportunity cost of not working full time for 3 years, and so on.

The issue for universities is whether applications drop by 56% next year, which is what this poll suggests. I somehow doubt they will (by which I mean that people often seem to say one thing in surveys like this but act differently in practice).

On the 2-year degree thing... yeah, sounds pretty sensible to me. Why aren't we seeing more of this?

Our map shows an average cost of £8820.10 a year for students aiming for university and just six planning to charge less than £8,000: Southampton Solent, £7,800; St Mary's University College, Twickenham, £8,000; Anglia Ruskin University, £8,000; University Campus Suffolk, £7,500 - £8,000; Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln, £7,500; and the University of Derby, £6,995 - £7,995.

This fits in with information gathered by the Times Higher Education Supplement, which has published a guide of fees for the academic year 2012-2013. Out of 57 universities, only 14 say they are planning to charge below the maximum.

The maximum fees figure does not take into account any scholarships or waivers for poorer students, and instead represents the headline fee level. It is also only a prospective figure from universities, as OFFA has the final say.

A spokesman from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills told Channel 4 News: "No university can know for certain yet what it will charge from autumn 2012. Each university will need to show how they meet tough new conditions in an approved access agreement from the Director for Fair Access, if it wants to charge more than £6,000.

Interactive map of proposed UK university tuition fees.

Stretching out repayments over a longer period means monthly payments will be lower than at present for many students.

Mr Willetts said this was "a deliberate decision that we're going to ease the burden on people in their 20s and 30s, but it does mean people pay over a longer period".

"I think people will easily be able to afford this 9%," he said.

He added that the value of an £80,000 debt would be different in 30 years' time.

"Taking cash figures and looking 30 years ahead is a rather odd way of doing it," he said.

At the end of the BBC Breakfast interview with David Willets this morning it was put to him that 1) English students couldn't move overseas to take their degrees (at least not in Europe because they would be charged anyway - is that right?) and that the current situation would create a two-tier system in the UK because Welsh and Scottish students will not have to pay fees. This was in the context of a general debate about whether the new fees were more or less fair then the old fees.

His response was along the lines of, "such is the wonder of devolution".

What a cop out?

It's the result of partial devolution, for Wales and Scotland but not England - in what way is that "fair"? - and unjoined-up thinking by the UK government (based, I suspect, largely on dogma). Period.

As one of my teachers once said to me, "life's not fair". Boy, are the current generation of English students going to find that out pretty bloody quickly!

There are all sorts of aspects of unfairness about the ways in which some people end up earning more money than other people. We already have a mechanism for recovering more money for the government from people who earn more - it's called income tax. (Clearly I'm ignoring issues like well-off people exploiting tax loopholes and the like).

God, I hate this government.