The gap between the number of men and women applying to university has grown fivefold under Labour as evermore women opt to take a degree.

While the Government trumpeted record numbers of teenagers wanting to continue with further education yesterday, academics voiced concerns about the widening rift between the sexes.

Between 1998 and 2007, 14,305 more men applied for university places, compared to 51,214 more women. This gap has increased every year for six years.

Malcolm Grant, Provost of University College London, gave warning that unless the trend slowed, colleges could become male-free zones.

He said: “We are concerned because you’d think that if we had an equality of genders in society, it would be reflected in their performance at A level and university.

“We need to understand what it is that’s causing young men not to thrive in the A-level culture and not to choose to apply to university. The male participation rate is sufficiently divergent that we’d expect it to continue.”

Professor Grant’s comments echo widely-held fears, already expressed to ministers, that young men face being locked out of university and marginalised in the jobs market.

Last year, 57 per cent of first degree graduates were women. In 1980, 60 per cent of university entrants were men. In 2005, 30 per cent of boys took A levels compared to 40 per cent of girls.

Overall, however, it was a day to celebrate. Figures released by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service showed that, a year after the introduction of top-up fees, the number of applicants rose by 6.4 per cent to 395,307 candidates. In England, where the £3,000-a-year deferred fees hit hardest, that figure rose to 7.2 per cent for people under 21.

Applicants from outside the EU rose by 6.6 per cent to 23,570, with Pakistan, India and the US recording the highest increases. The number of EU applicants rose by 15.8 per cent to 22,074.

The Government said that the Ucas figures confounded the critics of top-up fees and proved that higher education was not only for Britain’s monied classes, with the number of poorer applicants rising to 31.3 per cent.

“These highest ever figures show that tuition fees are not putting students off applying to university as many predicted,” Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, said. “The critics of the new system are being proved emphatically wrong.”

There were also large increases in applicants for the sciences and languages: physics 22.2 per cent, maths 10 per cent, chemical engineering 16.8 per cent and German 19.6 per cent. However, academics pointed out that the large increases in the top ten subjects were for those dominated by women.

This, said Alan Smithers, director of education and employment research at Buck-ingham University, reflected the changing nature of subjects being offered at university — such as nursing, education and psychology — which were more female oriented.

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