I think you're missing the point about the UK reforms. You're right that the government is withdrawing a lot of funding from the universities and getting the students to pick up the slack, but the difference is that students won't have to pay a penny back until they're earning a decent wage. I don't have the figures in front of me, but the threshold is significantly higher than minimum wage, so you would effectively have to be in a graduate-level job before having to pay anything back.
Once you get over the threshold, the payments you have to make are tied to your salary, so they should never become unmanageable. If for some reason you spend your whole working life at the low end of the pay scale, the debt is written off when you retire. Any graduate who uses what they've learned to make a decent living and contribute to society will easily pay off the loan.
The only students who really lose out here are the ones who don't work higher than an entry-level graduate position their whole lives, and you could argue that if they didn't come out of university with any marketable skills or motivation to get a better job, they probably shouldn't have been there in the first place. I don't think many people would argue that there are a huge number of people going to university that just don't need to be there, and it's not just elitist snobs that are saying that -- a lot of the graduates themselves sincerely regret their degrees and consider them a waste of time.
I think it's right to make people take on more of the burden of their decision to go to university, so that taxpayers aren't subsidising a lot of people who just don't need a degree. For the people who will make good use of their degree, the loan will be a minor setback, and they'll still come out vastly ahead of where they would have been if they hadn't got a degree.
