University admission season is upon us again – and with it another spasm of rage at the fact that higher education must be paid for.
As of yesterday, 467,500 students have been accepted on to university courses, and face the prospect of parting with some £9,000 a year for it.
They will find plenty of people demanding that the fee be magicked away – chiefly Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the National Union of Students.
.@jeremycorbyn would scrap tuition fees and enshrine free education for all as official Labour party policyhttps://t.co/8tGzY6ShRR
— Momentum (@PeoplesMomentum) August 15, 2016
These increasingly hard-to-distinguish pillars of the British hard Left would have you believe that the daily lives of graduates are blighted by their loan balance.
Their debts are described as “crushing”, and cited as a cause for anxiety, even alcoholism – contrary to the lived experience of almost any graduate.
The loan system is designed to make any serious financial hardship impossible, since repayment is in proportion to earnings, and stops entirely for anyone earning less than £17,500.
A bailiff will never knock on your door demanding cash, you can quit your job without worrying about it and – given that student debt is so ubiquitous – it is unlikely to stop you getting, say, a credit card or a mortgage.
Crushing student debt, soaring living costs and dwindling support – a snapshot of modern graduate life from @nusuk https://t.co/L8APT06lWA
— Joe Watts (@JoeWatts_) August 17, 2016
Critics of the system know this, and have no comeback. So they try to cover it up.
Lacking any actual evidence of hardship, they instead rely on a vague sense of foreboding.
A recent report by the NUS claimed 71% of graduates are “worried” about their debt (a 6% fall since they last asked, but shhhh)… and then notes that barely a third (37%) think it will have any actual effect of their finances.
The discrepancy rather highlights how loaded the first question is: “are you worried about student debt?” Any answer but “yes” makes you sound a reckless idiot.
Even better for fee critics is to scapegoat poor students, who they claim are especially scared to take out student loans.
However, poor students did not get the memo and continue to head to university in ever-greater numbers, as an independent commission confirmed last year.
As a graduate who still owes HMG some £18,000, and – notwithstanding a sideways move into hedge fund management – won’t be debt-free for many years, I can say it doesn’t trouble me at all. Nor do any of my friends ever moan about it – even the unemployed ones – for precisely the reasons above.
Young people have plenty to (justly) complain about. Skilled careers are on the wane, our working lives will likely be longer and less well-paid that our parents’.
The cost of housing spirals ever higher, and the Government seemingly stitched us all up with its promises to help us onto the housing ladder:
TELEGRAPH ENGLAND: Betrayal of Help to Buy Savers #tomorrowspaperstoday pic.twitter.com/Dl9wNEJm8q
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) August 19, 2016
None of this is affected by a relatively untroublesome monthly salary deduction.
Griping about the injustice of a system that is actually quite just only detracts from these larger concerns – and other, more nuanced problems with the loans system.
For example my status as someone who enrolled before 2012 means I currently pay a trifling 0.9% interest on my loan.
Meanwhile, fresh graduates are set to pay up to 4.6%, leaving many stuck simply servicing the interest.
That is a genuine injustice, and one where sustained pressure may actually be able to move the dial politically.
Meanwhile, promises of magic money to abolish fees entirely (see Jeremy Corbyn’s woeful attempt to cost his policy here) leave us stuck at square one, with no hope of actually making anything better.
