Universities must do more to end elitism in Britain by admitting thousands more students from poorer backgrounds, according to a new report commissioned by Gordon Brown.
The leading 13 universities are still failing to give enough preferential treatment to bright pupils from lower-income homes, the study will say.
It also proposes no-fee degrees for students who stay at home, a controversial initiative likely to be accepted by Lord Mandelson, who took on responsibility for higher education when his department was expanded last month.
The all-party report, written by 20 experts and chaired by former cabinet minister Alan Milburn, was the idea of the prime minister and is due to be published on Tuesday.
It has examined barriers to the professions and has grown into a manifesto against social immobility in the UK – a key policy theme for Downing Street.
The report, called Unleashing Aspiration, also:
• proposes a child education credit, or voucher, for those children from poor backgrounds in areas of under-performing schools so they can go to more popular schools;
• describes internships as the new excluding rung on the career ladder and demands a rethink about "qualification inflation", which has seen some careers such as nursing demand university degrees;
• identifies how journalism has become one of the most exclusive middle-class professions of the 21st century;
• reveals that 200 of the 260 cadet forces, from which army officers are drawn, are sited in private schools.
• calls for the closure of the government's "shameful" careers service, Connexions;
Mandelson has been briefed on the report's controversial contents and is due to give an initial response later this week.
Milburn admitted that the proposal for giving greater preference to students from lower income groups would be controversial: "Some universities are taking the context of pupil's educational achievement into account in deciding who gets a university place … a kid in a struggling inner-city comprehensive who manages to get one A and two Bs has probably had to work harder than a kid who gets the same result in a wealthy part of town."
To emphasise the point, Milburn will launch the report at King's College, London, which is aiming to broaden access to Guy's, King's and St Thomas' school of medicine.
Milburn said: "As many as 3,000 students from state schools are missing from the 13 leading universities in the country because their places have been taken by kids from independent schools with the same A-level results.
"All the evidence shows that the professional classes are now recruiting from a narrower and narrower part of the social spectrum."
Evidence shows that state-schooled pupils perform at the same rate as privately educated pupils with higher A-level grades when they get to university.
Milburn said: "The older generation of today's professionals, who were born in 1958 like me, came from families whose incomes were 17% above the average. The younger generation of today's professionals, who were born in 1970, came from families whose incomes were 27% above the average. Today's generation of doctors and lawyers, on average, came from families that earned two-thirds more than the average family."
Describing university as "still the principal funnel by which people get into the professions", he disclosed that the cost of government schemes to give poorer students access to university was £10,000 a head. But he said the funding may not be effective, partly because it was difficult to see how this money was spent. The Milburn committee will propose student fees costing as much as £10,000 over three years be waived to help the growing number of mature students studying at home.
In addition, the report suggests the funding council recognises modular degrees and calls for part-time students to qualify for student loans.
The committee proposes that universities have a representative on every secondary school governing body and more university tutors teach in underperforming schools to raise the aspirations of children from backgrounds with no history of university education.
A recent Sutton Trust review found that, despite living on the doorstep of many of the country's most academically selective universities, the least advantaged fifth of young people remain 10 times less likely to attend an elite university than the most advantaged fifth.
The committee says the higher education statistics agency should collect data on the socioeconomic background of students by university, by college and by course. A third of the information required is currently missing. The results should then be published every year, it says.
Milburn said the committee would not call for tuition fees to be reversed.
