Student loans have hurt generations, boomers must pay them

A few years ago, as my partner nonchalantly informed me that he’d finished paying off his student loan, I realised that I hadn’t thought about my own in quite some time. I’d never expected to earn enough to pay it off, but my circumstances had changed, and I was working a job with what felt like a decent salary. Maybe, I thought, I’d made a significant dent.

When I logged on to the Student Loans Company portal, my stomach dropped. I owed almost £30k. Frankly, it makes me furious. Since I was a teenager, I have laboured under the misapprehension that there would be no year-on-year interest on this loan, but the interest payments have only risen, even as I’ve paid off more money. It is likely that my balance will never hit zero.

Coming from a lower-income family, I had long accepted the precarity of my financial position at university — despite the massive loans I had taken out, London rent is expensive. I worked long hours at a job while also studying. I ate beans for dinner. When my friends hopped in a taxi, I’d run for the night bus. Years down the line, this still felt like an unexpectedly sharp slap.

This is the reality of student debt today: students who took out the largest loans — only eligible because we came from the poorest families — are saddled with growing interest rates and seemingly never-ending payments. And yet, the government continues to equivocate on exactly what it is going to do to support those graduates who are struggling, pointing toward “wider fiscal priorities”. It is a deep sickness eating away at the prospects of generations, one after the other.

My own debt is nothing compared to those who were unfortunate enough to miss the cut-off mark for £3,000 fees. I sneaked in at the last gasp as a 17-year-old in 2011. Fees tripled to £9,000 in 2012 after what I still remember, protest placards raised, as an unbridled betrayal by then-Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg and Tory leader David Cameron. In 2016, maintenance grants were also abolished.

In July, the Treasury Select Committee’s inquiry concluded that the student loan system is “broken” and “unfair”. The UK has the highest student debt not just in Europe, but across the highest-income countries in the world. It was a shock to learn that as of 2025, the average student debt in England is £53,000 — and that despite elite colleges in the USA charging obscene fees, students in England leave uni with three times more debt than most of their American counterparts.

When so many people who never went to university are struggling with poverty, insecure work and the cost of simply getting by, perhaps there is something uncomfortable about depicting graduates as victims. The situation is mitigated: they still earn significantly more than non-graduates, having a university degree is still essential to many high-powered career paths, and I’m hyper-conscious that a loan which only kicks in at the point of earnings that are over a decent threshold might be regarded as a privilege.

But the other truth is this: while university has long been touted as the great leveller, the social mobility totem, this isn’t always the case. Under the current system, it’s the poorest graduates who are suffering most; the ones who don’t come from families like my partner’s (who could afford to support them through their studies and who may have taken courses at less “highly-regarded” universities. They know that, in part thanks to their depressed paycheques, they will never get on the property ladder, may never move out of their parents’ homes, find themselves in their late thirties desperate to start families but crippled by loans they can’t escape and who — and we now know this because the inquiry confirmed it — were functionally missold their loans in the first place, unable to make informed choices about interest rates or long-term repayments. When car loans are missold, it’s a national scandal. When young people are s*****d over, it’s tumbleweed.

This should outrage you. A generation of students have been lied to. Even those of us who believe in the university system and the importance of higher education cannot help but curse. For women especially, who, according to one advocacy group, “carry student debt for significantly longer, often into their fifties and sixties”, the situation is stark. If they become mothers, they might stop making regular payments on their student loan; the debt builds, and childcare costs soar as they struggle to save.

Last year, the Labour government decided to freeze the threshold at which grads start to repay their loans at £29,385, after years of Tory mismanagement — not just the increase in fees, but also widely-criticised high interest rates. At a time when the cost of living and inflation continue to soar, it is a startlingly unfair scenario. The Autumn Budget will be a chance for Burnham, who, like most older politicians, went to a prestigious university when fees were practically non-existent, to put a line in the sand for graduates.