A little student loans news, why not? The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) recently pointed out that some students and graduates in England will be paying up to 12% interest on their loans from September, before a rate dip in March 2023 that will precipitate a (for now, anyway) interest cap. This huge, short-term spike in costs comes not long after changes to the whole system were announced, increasing the time over which graduates pay back their loans from 30 to 40 years, and lowering the repayment threshold. Forty years of debt in exchange for “learning English, but a bit more” seems fairly disproportionate to me, though perhaps that is now the point.
Whenever something like this happens – a huge student finance machination that inevitably makes the decision about whether to go to university or not more fraught than ever, and it happens every few years like clockwork – I do wonder what the endgame to all this is. Do we want to price smart people out from getting smarter for ever? Do we want everyone to be in debt for ever? Is this the society we want to live in? Well, apparently, yes.
