The row over student loans: is the system unfair?

The row over student loans: is the system unfair?

Many graduates who took out student loans feel they got “an incomprehensibly unfair deal that they did not understand and now cannot escape”, says John Blake, formerly of the Office for Students. The problems are worst for the estimated 5.8 million people who took out “Plan 2” loans, the main scheme from late 2012 to mid 2023. While the interest rate on other loans is set at the Retail Prices Index (RPI) measure of inflation, Plan 2 loans are ch…

Graduates are right to be furious about student loans

When I was seventeen, I signed up for a student loan to cover the cost of going to university. Teachers, parents and the university system were in unanimous agreement that the loan was a good deal, enabling me to study and then pay back what I owed once I started earning a good salary. I was not told that going to university would mean allowing the state to seize arbitrary amounts of my income to plug gaps in its budget for most of the rest of m…