In my last job, £258 of every paycheque was syphoned off to the Student Loans Company. Now that I’ve gone freelance, I sometimes have palpitations about the chunk of money I’ll have to hand over to cover the debt come tax return time.
For my English literature degree, I spent three years devouring paperbacks and discussing similes, metaphors, motifs and the like. It looks like I’ll be paying for those three years for quite a while yet. I still have a mammoth £21,000 to clear, though the student loans man did point out that the debt will be wiped in 2035, when I’m 47 years old. For students enrolling at university this autumn, the loan won’t be wiped until 40 years has passed — meaning that many will be repaying the debt for the majority of their working lives.
