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Mrs Burt – who opposed higher fees before the 2010 General Election – said the reforms were more “progressive” than those under Labour.
She told the Commons: “It is no secret that had the Liberal Democrats won the general election, we would have done things differently.
“However, I am proud of the coalition agreement, which incorporated two thirds of our manifesto pledges.
“Sadly, our tuition fees policy fell into the group of manifesto pledges that remain unfulfilled.”
She said: “Working in coalition has its challenges, believe me, but it also has its rewards.
“One of the rewards was negotiating with Conservative colleagues to make the system that we have ended up with more progressive than the Labour system we inherited.”
Mrs Burt said: “There are no up-front fees for students, graduates will start to pay only when they can afford to, and there will be lower lifetime contributions for the poorest quarter of students compared with the system that Labour left behind.”
She said Labour introduced fees and later top-up fees after pledging not to and would have raised fees further if it stayed in Government.
Mrs Burt said £9,000 was a maximum and not average fee and hit out at a Labour target to get 50 per cent of young people to university.
She said: “Labour set that target, but quickly realised that it did not know how to pay for it.
“It was left with a financial black hole and was forced to slash student places to fill it, leaving thousands of students in the lurch.”
It comes after the BBC reported that three quarters of universities want to charge £9,000 for some or all courses.
In December 2009 Mrs Burt wrote on her website that party leaders had “confirmed their commitment to scrapping student tuition fees”.
She said then: “Labour and the Conservatives refuse to address the issue of fees and there is a real danger that both of them would lift the cap on fees which could mean even more debt for students when they leave university.”
Labour’s Tristram Hunt told Wednesday’s debate: “Every decent university will go for the top rate, so we will go from having some of the lowest fees to having some of the very highest.
“That represents an ideological decision to withdraw the state from higher education.”
They were speaking at a debate on a motion by Labour’s John Denham to condemn the Government’s “failure” that £9,000 fees would be “exceptional”.
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