Answer: from what I remember about being that age: yes.  
 - Fees or paid for real if you earn over £21,000 in future and start paying them back.  
 - Living costs like rent and food are paid for real and cheaper in some towns than others (commuting to an job you pay for isn't a great experience). 
 - Options are constrained for real, with the most procicious (however that's spelt) students from the most over-coached schools getting the best offers and exam-flunkers, as I was 30 years ago, getting fewer options through clearing. 
 - Quality of what you want and what's on offer varies for real. Economics is a contentious subject, for example, with Leicester University scoring 37% overall satisfaction for their BSc Economics course but double that for their BA Economics course. That suggests that tweaks to the syllabus and the way it is taught are important to students. For details check Unistats.gov.uk for the course you are interested in rather than bother with the league tables which should be dumped in the river I think