If, like many others, you are appalled at the government’s new cap on tuition fees for UK students, you should be grateful that you haven’t just landed at Heathrow, ready for the start of the new academic year as an international student. That 9,000, payable annually, isn’t exactly loose change – to put it mildly – but if you were making your way from the airport to study humanities at UCL, you should have stashed away 14,000 for tuition fees for this year alone. If you’re planning on taking a science course there, you ought to have 16,250 in your back pocket to pay for it, this year at least… and if you’d arrived here to take a medical course at UCL, you’d better have 27,500 in your backpack to cover course fees for the first year alone.