But it doesn’t feel that way: it feels overwhelming, to lose nearly a tenth of your earnings to not even make a dent in your borrowing, especially as the cost of living gallops up around you. That you won’t be paying your student loans out of your pension isn’t, it turns out, much comfort.
Even the fact that this current crisis relates to only a subset of graduates (those who attended university between 2012 and 2022) doesn’t help. Partly that’s because the system in place since 2022 has its own problems, including a write-off date ten years later than other grads, but more because pointing out to the so-called “Plan 2” students that this isn’t happening to everyone just compounds their sense of unfairness. They know it isn’t happening to everyone: they are working with more senior colleagues who had exactly the same education experience but went to university 12 years (or even 12 months) earlier, and have already paid their loans off. Or at the next desk, there’s someone whose parents had the resources necessary to mean no money had to be borrowed in the first place.
Government ministers, clearly concerned that the system is too fragile to change, are defending the arrangement on its merits, but it’s a futile task. Actuarial neatness is no match for lived experience, and spreadsheets cannot rebut a widespread sense of injustice. The English higher education system, despite much criticism, really is world-leading, and it should be one in which social justice is done and is seen to be done. The student loan system now fails that second test.
The question, therefore, is not whether the system must change, but how and when. Delay carries costs. While recent debate has focused narrowly on fees and loans, the underlying fragility of university finances has not abated. Institutions are responding with short term retrenchment, eroding quality and reputation in ways that will be hard to reverse.