There has been a lot of speculation about students facing $100,000 degrees if fees are deregulated. However, my view is that this is very unlikely outside small areas such as medicine, dentistry or veterinary science.

While we are still planning much more work on pricing issues, international student fees provide a a guide to the outer limits of what is likely to be possible – what universities think that the market will pay. Where there are deregulated markets for both internationals and domestics, in the private sector and at postgraduate level, our research is yet to find any cases in which domestic students are charged more, and many cases in which they are charged less.

Our methodology in collecting fees was to look at university websites and compare similar courses across universities. This was done for all the universities in 2013, although not all teach all the covered courses. We then deducted tuition subsidy amounts, as a guide to how these might bring fees down. The Guardian published the results.

The totals vary considerably, but most full courses would end up costing between $35,000 and $60,000 on a simple average of quoted fees. Students would have to decide whether or not the more expensive courses were value for money.