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25 Kommentare
Helen Lambert borrowed £57,000 to go to university and began repaying her student loan in 2021 after starting work as an NHS nurse.
Since then she has repaid more than £5,000, typically having about £145 a month taken from her pay packet. But everything she hands over is dwarfed by the £400-plus of interest that is added to her debt every month, thanks to rates that have been as high as 8%.
Her total outstanding debt had ballooned to more than £77,000 by the end of November, and it is set to get a lot bigger as there are another 25 years left of the 30-year repayment period.
Lambert does not think her studies should have been free, but she says: “It is so disheartening to have this level of debt hanging over you with no achievable way to clear it or even reduce it while they add on upwards of £400 a month in interest.”
She was particularly unlucky because from 2017 to 2020 – the three years she was at university – there was little financial help available for nursing students. NHS bursaries, which covered tuition fees and some living costs and were worth up to £16,454 a year, were axed in August 2017, just weeks before she started her course. It was not until September 2020, after she had graduated, that the government introduced a partial replacement in the form of a grant worth at least £5,000 a year to help with living costs.
Lambert is one of millions of graduates who have a plan 2 student loan. They include the 29-year-old Labour MP Nadia Whittome, who this month posted on Instagram that she had left university in 2019 with £49,600 of debt and then a few months later became an MP, giving her a salary “that puts me in the top 5% in the country”. Six years on, her repayments have shaved just £1,000 off that debt. “If MPs are barely making a dent in their student loan debt after six years of repayments, what chance do other graduates have?” she said.
I can’t even imagine the debt rises for people on the latest plan, I was so fortunate to get the last year of the previous one and even working a well paid job my interest is exceeding my payments.
I’ve just accepted its a forever debt that will exist until its written off, biggest scam ever when if I had the mental discipline at the time I could have learnt everything I did at uni from youtube tutorials (which was in fact how they taught).
A never-shrinking mountain of debt is not the way. Creating our own home-grown experts is important and university is one of the best ways for us to do it at good economies of scale and it should be a cost the country as a whole shoulders.
That said we need a balance to ensure some minimum wage worker who never had the chance to experience university themselves isn’t paying taxes to fund the education and uni parties of those destined for far more lucrative careers. Bit grim to be taxing people to fund who could be their future boss.
> She was particularly unlucky because from 2017 to 2020 – the three years she was at university – there was little financial help available for nursing students. NHS bursaries, which covered tuition fees and some living costs and were worth up to £16,454 a year, were axed in August 2017, just weeks before she started her course. **It was not until September 2020, after she had graduated, that the government introduced a partial replacement in the form of a grant worth at least £5,000 a year to help with living costs.**
That’s unlucky.
More generally though, we ought to subsidise certain degrees like nursing with clauses that encourage graduates to work in the UK after graduation.
It doesn’t have to be free, it could be they pay a reduced interest rate on the loan.
Then again, I suspect most people will never actually repay their loan, and it’s just a long term graduate tax. Which sucks because we need graduates.
It’s idiotic that top degrees and certain courses aren’t funded by the tax payer. It should be, we need these people. We don’t need gender study grads, they can take £50k debt on their own dime.
It’s absurd that degrees are necessary required to be able to enter the highest paying jobs and thus contribute the most to the economy, but we also punish people for the privilege of trying to earn enough to pay more tax. The fact that the interest is higher than inflation just takes it beyond the pale.
My debt is at nearly 90k lol
I earn 60k, and the debt still goes up and up
i think the vast majority will barely scratch their student debt.
I’m not sure what will be the reality when most students get towards retirement in the next 30-40 years with collectively billions of student debt. Will they still pay it during retirement? Will the government forgive all of it?
with wage stagnation I’d imagine an awful lot of that student debt is barely even paid towards unless they choose to drop it to minimum wage for when you start paying it back.
People here always defend it as ‚just a graduate tax‘, but this isn’t correct. Those on the highest income (or with enormous support from parents) end up paying less because they avoid accruing significant interest. The current system places the greatest burden on those with moderate income (40-80k), since they end up accruing significant interest alongside higher repayments. If we’re supposed to treat it as a graduate tax then actually make it a graduate tax, rather than the awful current system that allows the wealthiest to pay less.
In all effect student loans are basically just a graduate tax, nothing more, nothing less.
The biggest issue for me is that the richest people don’t have to pay so much. A graduate tax where you pay a percentage of your income above a certain threshold for a certain amount of time – fine. So long as the threshold covers the cost of living (which it does it most places), then this doesn’t seem unreasonable. It doesn’t come up on credit ratings and isn’t factored in when getting a mortgage.
But why do the richest get a free pass? They can go to university, focus entirely on their studies because they don’t have a student job, and then pay off the entire loan with no interest. Meanwhile universities are struggling to make ends meet.
If everyone actually paid a graduate tax for the same amount of time, you could potentially increase funding to universities and/or raise the threshold for repayments so those with lower paying jobs (particularly thinking of nurses and teachers here) have more expendable income every month.
Even worse if you have a masters degree. Im paying off two student loans simultaneously which increase with interest more than I pay each month – despite being on a salary above 50k. I’ve accepted it as graduate tax at this point.
My partner is on 80k a year and is paying £500 a month. She is due to pay it off roughly 2 years before it would be wiped and will pay 200% of what she borrowed. Her degree was not needed for her job and infact has never used it.
I am sure that as long as we keep unfairly taxing the things we want people to do like getting a better education, building a pension, rising through the ranks etc. and letting billionaires evade tax left, right and centre things will improve eventually.
I literally randomly felt like checking mine last week, borrowed the minimum amount, no maintenance loan, risen from £29,000 to £45,000 despite contributing to it every month. Just accepting it’s there forever
I would earn more if HMRC didn’t want 51% of it
Such a false economy
Interest on student loans should be stopped entirely or capped at 1% maximum. As it stands most loans will never be paid off, and it’s essentially become a lifetime tax. By reducing the interest people would have a realistic chance of being able to pay off the debt.
Don’t pay them back! Or what? You won’t be able to buy a house or start a family? Hahahaha!
Yeah. I graduated in 2021 having borrowed about 88 for my 5 year degree. I’m now a dentist, my earnings far surpass the national median wage. And my loan has ballooned to 108k despite repayments. It’s a grad tax. By the time it’s wiped in 2051 I will probably have repaid just over what I borrowed, and the interest will have grown it to several hundred thousand most likely. I can’t bring myself to care about it, and without a lottery win there’s literally no point paying more than the minimum.
I cleared mine at 36. A friend cleared hers at 26, mum and dad paid hers in a big lump. Over that 10 years I paid a lot more in interest. That’s how loans work, the end.
Student loans shouldn’t even exist, how does a country expect to find talent when it’s a lifetime of debt.
Or is that the point, debt makes people get up in the mornings?
It’s all part of the decline
Businesses operating in the UK (which mostly aren’t UK owned any more) don’t want to invest in staff, they’d much prefer to recruit talent from abroad (where student costs are lower) or outsource. Students have heavy costs which effectively turn into a lifetime debt at a time of shrinking jobs and instability
We have to pay billions in benefits to the elderly, who are not economically active, which requires tax. But taxing asset holders is inconceivable to our government, and taxing multinationals is hard to achieve, so the burden goes onto people who do earn.
High earners are actually quite maligned in the UK, despite being the only ones able to keep the show running. I say high earners but many are really what would have been medium earners.
(Someone on £60k today would, per inflation, would have been on £41k in 2015 – i.e. a mildly above average wage. Nevertheless we have all been told train drivers are uppity for wanting pensions on their luxurious £50k salaries.)
Nothing can be built because Barbara and Fred don’t like roadworks and there’s a large and complex legal machinery they can use to challenge the government on what it does, mostly at the government’s expense. Universities are facing debt bubbles and now largely just sell paper degrees to Chinese students, who, from what I’ve heard, look at British education a lot less favourably than they did ten years ago.
Most of our investments and futures are tied up in an economy that is vulnerable to shocks, be that an AI bubble collapse, war, a US treasury freefall, or whatever crises 2027 has in store for us.
If you were a young person in Britain today, what would you do? I’d probably flee, to be honest
I currently have about £80k of student loan debt. At my current repayment rate and interest, my debt will have reduced to a measly £250k when it gets wiped.
I have always said that if degrees have to be paid for it should be via a graduate tax. It should apply to everyone with a degree or tertiary qualification even if was attained before loans started. For those who disagree, this would apply to me.
Ah yes, compound interest at work. Just as planned.