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The funding of universities and their students has a strange capacity for upending governments and politicians.

Top-up fees nearly did for Tony Blair in the noughties,

and a decade later, the fees issue was an

albatross around the neck of Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg. Right now, we may be heading for

another crisis, with, in the last week, the Education Secretary Julian Keegan and the Foreign Secretary

David Cameron, among those ministers warning Rishi Sunak that government plans to cut

overseas students' numbers may lead to a crisis in our colleges.

A crisis which would face whichever parties in government after July 4th.

So how close to the brink are our universities and how much do they depend on foreign students?

Step inside the briefing room and together we'll find out.

First, the essential facts.

Brownwyn Jeffries is the BBC's education editor.

Brownwin Jeffries, how many people actually go to university right now?

And how does that compare to 10, 20, 30 years ago, or even when I went a little bit longer than that?

Well, if you look at the most recent official figures we have from a couple of years ago,

and it won't have changed very much, you're talking at just under 3 million,

so 2.86 million students in the UK,

from the UK, the EU and non-EU students, all of them together, are going to university.

If we think about what's changed just in the UK, we've seen a seismic shift over the last 20, 25 years.

So by the age of 20, around 47% of English students and UK students are going to university.

If you went back to the turn of the century, you'd be looking at around a third. And of course,

...