I will never pay my student loan back, and that’s okay
By Tom Haynes
The first dent I made in my student debt was about three years ago. I was working for a different company, on a starting salary that would give a junior lawyer an aneurysm, and taking on extra shifts to make ends meet. On that basis, the Student Loans Company siphoned off its first ￡12 from my paypacket.
It had been four years since I’d left university, so when I spotted this deduction I looked for the first time at the amount of debt I had left to clear, which thanks to the accrued interest was a hefty amount indeed. Needless to say, I am paying the debt off more regularly now, but having taken so long to get out of the starting blocks I will probably never clear it.
My Twitter timeline this week was full of similar stories: one user who bravely posted his own balance remarked that despite working 11 out of the last 12 months and making repayments of more than ￡800, his net repayment was somehow still -￡1,200, meaning he was even more in debt to the SLC than when he started. “Student finance in the UK is hilarious,” he joked.
I think the discourse around student debt has reared its head again partly because of the recent slew of news stories around Waspis (women against state pension inequality). To give you the Cliffnotes, last week the Parliamentary Ombudsman said that the Government was guilty of maladministration because it delayed informing some women that their state pension age would rise from 60 to 65. As a result, affected women may be in for a windfall of between ￡1,000 and ￡3,000 in compensation.
The basic argument of the Waspis boils down to an expectation that by paying their own National Insurance throughout their lives, they had entered into a “contract” with the Government that the state pension age they were promised at the time should have been honoured.
Meanwhile, the goalposts around how and when student debt is repaid constantly shift. From September, students will come under the latest iteration of student loans, Plan 5. Interest rates have been lowered, but the starting salary at which repayments are taken has also been lowered. And, crucially, loans are now written off after 40 years, rather than 30.
All this to say I have limited sympathy for the Waspis entertaining any notion that the Government owes them some sort of certainty. I was 17 when I agreed to take out a student loan, but it was there in the fine print the whole time that I was signing up for a ballooning mass of debt I’d probably never clear working in media, so I have no right to moan about it.
I’ve sort of made my peace with the fact the decision to take out a student loan will haunt my salary like an ever-fattening ghost until I retire. Maybe I am giving the Government too much credit here but I’d say the system is working as intended.
People who went to uni and got real jobs that paid well out the gate, then paid even better as time went on, will pay off their loans before the interest swells the debt to an unkillable size. People like me who got softer degrees and lower-paid jobs are punished with a 30-year repayment plan that is essentially a tax. Given the Tories’ push for more young people to take on apprenticeships and trade jobs, I’m not surprised this is how student finance plays out.
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8 个月It doesn't bother me to be in debt. They don't give us anything anyway even with good credit. You have to get it from the grave.
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8 个月The difference between the waspi situation and the loan situation is those with a loan chose to do so. They could have not gone to university as many other chose to and didn’t . WASPI women who worked had no choice in the matter. Other than not working I suppose.