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Your leader "Top-up fears diminish" (January 28) is right - it would be reasonable to expect many applicants to have deferred their gap year to beat the fees hike. Perhaps the figures reported in the article "Ucas: no rush to beat top-ups" (January 28) conceal such behaviour? Given that the percentage of young full-time entrants has been flat or has fallen for two years, the failure, in a third successive year of the number of applications to keep pace with the increase in the size of the age group was to be expected.

We will have to wait until next year to see whether the gap was diminished by some people applying earlier than they intended to do because of fees.

Ian McNay
Professor emeritus, higher education and management
Greenwich University