I had it easy with student debt – but Gen Z are completely screwed
More than a third of people now believe a degree isn’t worth the time and money it costs, and with farcical interest rates meaning student debt is rising faster than it can be paid off, graduates are furious. Or they would be, if they had the emotional bandwidth.
The thing about debt, you see, is that it takes a psychological toll as well as a financial one – demanding all of your energy just to keep your head above water.
I graduated more than a decade ago – and when I took out my own student loans back in 2011, as a feckless 18-year-old, I barely registered it as a decision. Today, I thank my lucky stars for two key reasons. Firstly, the fact that the money I was borrowing was on Plan 1 meant that my university tuition cost me just over £3,000 a year, rather than the £9,000 annual sum inflicted on those doing the exact same thing a year later (the Plan 2 scheme ran from September 2012 to July 2023).
Secondly, I am grateful for the financial nonchalance afforded to me and others like me at the time. Sure, between maintenance and tuition, I was borrowing tens of thousands of pounds before I’d even left home – yet the low interest rates and high repayment thresholds meant it never felt like a burden.
As a result, my similarly deluded peers and I were able to leave university and plunge into the big wide world, taking all sorts of professional and personal risks (moving to London, freelancing etc) that would have felt completely out of the question had I started university just one year later.
There are other financial factors that eased my personal transition to adult life – I’m now in my early thirties, but as I grew up, rents were low enough that I never had to limp back to my mum’s house, or live in houseshares with strangers; for many younger people today, those living arrangements are de rigueur.
While millennials like me have plenty to complain about – sky-high house prices, job precarity – we still have it better than Gen Z. For me, university felt like an extension of school, and I took it with commensurate (non)seriousness. That meant I felt fine apportioning plenty of time to socialising as well as studying; chalking it all up to “valuable life experience” and forging relationships that I continue to treasure today.
For current students, meanwhile, awareness that the sums they owe are ever-escalating surely has an insidious effect, beginning the moment they step onto campus for the first time.
Had I been paying three times as much for my lectures and seminars, I might have taken a rather less relaxed approach – no doubt missing out socially, as a result. What’s more, with such pressure to earn top marks – to make your investment “count” – I can see why some students might feel entitled to a first-class degree classification simply for turning up (just as tutors may feel pressure to award them). The more something costs, the more transactional it inevitably becomes.
And sure, we can count the cost in pounds, but the real toll of the student loans crisis remains unknowable: the chances not taken, the jobs not applied for, the cities not moved to, the adventures never embarked on. The young lives that never had the chance to get off the starting blocks; the talented kids stuck in their childhood bedrooms, casting around for meaningful employment while the debt mounts – or, worse, working a dead-end job because it pays the bills.
It’s a bleak picture, but it’s a real one for thousands of young people across the country – and the least they deserve is a moment to catch their breath. If the Government can’t forgive the loans, then they must at least do away with the Kafkaesque interest rates.
A formal inquiry, which started today, may be long overdue, but surely it doesn’t take one to see the catastrophic unfairness of our student debt problem, inflicted on a whole generation.
