Statements from the government that under their reform package higher education fees will go down as well as up have been met with ridicule in social media and even from a Canadian higher education policy research institute.

Certainly it is unlikely that fees for public university students will go down. Cuts to public subsidies for most disciplines mean that universities will need to increase their charges just to maintain current revenue per student.

But undergraduate students in private universities and colleges, and the TAFEs that now offer degrees, will become eligible for public subsidies under the Pyne reform package, as recommended by the report I wrote with David Kemp. Exactly at what level is yet to be determined. But it will be above the zero level most of their students currently receive (under various ad hoc deals with government, a few of the around 130 potentially affected institutions already have some subsidised places).

While I doubt that the full value of the subsidy will be passed on in lower fees, particularly in the more generously subsidised disciplines we should see fees dropping by thousands of dollars for students outside the public university sector. The Budget papers suggest that 80,000 students could benefit from this change.

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.