Students should be willing to pay higher tuition fees for university education, the chancellor of Oxford University suggested.

Lord Patten said the capped £3,000 a year fee was “intolerably” low.

He told a conference: “It is surely a mad world in which parents or grandparents are prepared to shell out tens of thousands of pounds to put their children through private schools to get them into universities, and then object to them paying a tuition fee of more than £3,000 when they are there.”