What a mess. The catastrophe that is UK higher education grows worse by the day. It is now clear that the coalition government has got its calculations wrong. But it is not going to let that tiny detail stand in the way of a funding policy that - with its slashing of university teaching support and withdrawal of education maintenance allowances - has been described as an act of "economic illiteracy and cultural vandalism" by Nick Barr, professor of public economics at the London School of Economics and an architect of tuition fees.

The Treasury modelled its funding on average tuition fees across the sector of £7,500 a year. Any university that wishes to charge more than £6,000 must negotiate annual agreements with the Office for Fair Access. If these benchmarks are not met, Offa can revoke the agreement and impose a fine of £500,000.

Having done their own sums, however, many universities have concluded that they will have to set fees well above £6,000 just to break even. Politically, the government cannot let that happen, so ministers are now pulling out all the stops. A desperate government now seems to be throwing everything but the kitchen sink at universities. Last week, in an apparent challenge to autonomy, it threatened to change legislation to prevent universities' charges clustering around the upper limit. Then vice-chancellors were apparently told that if they did try to charge £9,000, the Treasury would have to claw back money through the science budget at research-led institutions and through student numbers at teaching-led institutions.

And if that weren't enough for universities to contend with, Aaron Porter, president of the National Union of Students, makes it clear in our cover story that pressure will be applied from below as well as from above by consumer students paying more than ever.

A mess indeed.

I don't know about how your average 18 year old student feels about their relationship with their university but for any parent it seems to me that the relationship is increasingly one of 'customer' - and like any customer relationship, consumer-based thinking will lead to bottom-up pressure on pricing and (perceived) product quality.

Does the current and/or near term offer from universities offer value for money? I'm not sure.

But it's not quite as simple as that because there is a big cultural legacy around the value of the whole "going to uni, student experience" - it's not just about the qualification at the end. The financial cost is one factor in any decision-making process. So we are looking at a potential cultural change here, not just a change in consumer habits - and one that is particularly acute given a recent political past that has played up the value of more and more people getting a university education. How long that cultural change might take remains to be seen but it seems unlikely to be very rapid.

Or maybe this government will u-turn on this issue in some way? I doubt it but anything seems possible right now?

Whatever the outcome, it strikes me that those VCs who remained silent on this issue prior to the vote, don't exactly come out of things smelling of roses?