Two decades ago tuition was free and many students received quite generous maintenance grants to cover living costs. Today tuition costs £1100 per year at English universities and the maintenance grant is no more, although the situation is different elsewhere in the UK.

However, two things have not changed. First, students from middle-class backgrounds are still much more likely to go to university than those from poorer homes. Reversing this situation – which he calls a “national disgrace” – is one of the top priorities of Charles Clarke, the secretary of state for education. Clarke’s answer is to re-introduce maintenance grants for the poorest students, and to allow all students to defer the payment of tuition fees and loans until after they have graduated and are earning more than £15 000 per year.

However, the government is also proposing that universities will be able to charge anything up to £3000 per year in tuition fees – which means that students could quite easily graduate with debts in excess of £15 000 following a three-year degree. This will surely scare off the very students that Clarke is seeking to attract into higher education. The government’s solution is to appoint an “access regulator” to make sure that any university that wants to increase its tuition fees above the current level has rigorous admissions procedures in place and can also provide bursaries for students from poorer backgrounds.

The second thing that has not changed over the past decade is the annual output of physics graduates from universities in the UK. This figure has remained at about 2300 while the total number of graduates for all subjects has more than doubled. What impact will the measures in the White Paper have on physics? There is unlikely to be a fall in student numbers for departments that scrap tuition fees – a possibility that is allowed for by the White Paper – or maintain them at current levels. However, physics is often seen as an expensive subject in universities, and vice-chancellors are unlikely to look kindly on such suggestions.

Departments seeking to increase tuition fees face two challenges: to convince the students that their investment in a physics degree will be worthwhile; and to get approval from the access regulator. The best way for departments to convince students will be to demonstrate how successful their graduates have been. There is also a need for the physics community as a whole to mount a public-relations campaign that shows schoolchildren that a degree in physics can be the starting point for a wide range of careers – including many that pay much better than working in academic research.

And thinking hard about how to convince the access regulator that students from poorer backgrounds can be attracted into physics will be good for departments. There must surely be ways of, for example, employing undergraduates during vacations to enthuse these would-be physicists in labs that would otherwise be lying empty. And rarely a month passes without some former physicist endowing a new research centre at a university – are there ways of encouraging similar contributions to undergraduate teaching?

Most of the proposals in the White Paper will not come into effect until 2006 – which gives the physics community time to think about these and others questions. What, for instance, will be the impact of increased debt on the numbers of students carrying on to do research? The physics community must not, however, forget about its most pressing problem – the shortage of physics and science teachers in schools. Unless this situation is reversed, worries about life after 2006 could well be academic.