WARNINGS from the Independent Commission on Fees (ICF) that the cost of university tuition will soon rise even further spell further pain for young people in this country.

In a Budget stuffed with unpleasant surprises, Chancellor George Osborne successfully buried the news that “high-quality” educational establishments would be able to bust the £9,000 tuition fee cap from 2017.

How these “high-quality” establishments will be defined is not known.The £9,000-a-year benchmark was initially portrayed as the upper end of the scale, but was rapidly adopted by almost all universities as the scale of government cuts to their funding became clear.

Even if Osborne’s definition of quality proves more discerning in future, that’s no advertisement for a policy that will see places at the most prestigious universities reserved for the richest, exacerbating the social stratification that already disfigures this country.

The commission points out that four in five students now worry about how they will cope with living costs while substantial majorities are also concerned about the cost of tuition and how they will pay back their student loans.

Fee caps were always made to be broken. That is why the stark and positive commitment by Jeremy Corbyn — that tuition fees will be abolished if a Corbyn-led Labour Party wins office — is so important.

Before announcing his policy, Corbyn apologised on behalf of the Labour Party for introducing the fees in the late 1990s, although as a consistent opponent of them he is innocent of that election pledge-breaking betrayal.

What a contrast to previous Labour leaderships, which railed at the Tories and Lib Dems for raising fees that they had originally introduced.

Of course, the higher fees are, the worse for students. And the greater the chance the less well-off will be priced out of higher education entirely.

So Ed Miliband’s commitment to cut fees to £6,000 a year was not a terrible policy.

Life would have got that bit easier for young people if he had won in May — and they needed it. The Institute for Fiscal Studies points out that median earnings for those aged 22-30 dropped a staggering 15 per cent between 2008 and 2013. Almost a third of twenty-somethings are now in poverty. 

Not a situation likely to improve when under-25s are even cut out of Osborne’s pale imitation of a “living wage” announced during the bonfire of the tax credits.

The ICF calls for a review into whether fees are “value for money,” no doubt perceiving that paying through the nose for an education may prove risky in an economy geared to rock-bottom wages, insecure work and crippling personal debt.

But simply reducing fees will not work. Because the real gulf here is an ideological one, not a matter of finances.On the one hand, we have the Tories and their policy of privilege, where restricting access to education is not a problem.

But equally insidious is the Blairite assumption that it’s OK for people to borrow money to pay for their education, since they will earn more later on in life.

The Labour right would no doubt term this “aspirational,” but it reduces education to an individual consumer purchase.

Corbyn’s vision — shared by this newspaper, which like the Islington North MP has opposed tuition fees from their inception — is of education as a right and a social good, where we pay together as a society for things which benefit us all.

We all need nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers and many other professionals. And we all win when they see their training as entailing responsibility rather than individual self-advancement.

No wonder Corbyn’s campaign is wrong-footing his halfway-house rivals and attracting ever greater public support.