We need free education

Hamza Khan, West London Socialist Party

Over a decade since tuition fees were trebled and amongst mounting graduate anger, a parliamentary inquiry was launched to examine the impact of the student loan repayment system. The inquiry was conducted following controversy over Plan 2 loans, which were created by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government in 2012. A Plan 2 loan means that if you earn over a minimum threshold, 9% of your income above that amount is deducted toward student loan repayments. In November last year, Rachel Reeves fixed the minimum repayment threshold to £29,385 from 2027 to 2030, while the loans themselves continue to rise by at least the RPI inflation rate.

Of the 49,357 respondents to the inquiry who had taken out student loans, 40,373 said the financial impact of repaying their student loan was worse than they expected. 28,275 said that they did not understand the terms and conditions of their student loans before they took them out, a statistic that is wholly unsurprising when you consider that the majority of people signing up for this loan are 17 or 18 years of age, signing on to a potentially 40-year-long commitment. 45,843 said that they think the repayment terms were not reasonable and 25,291 said they would not take their student loan out if they were given the choice again.

These numbers reflect the dire reality of a generation of graduates who were promised that a university degree would give them a reasonable route to gainful employment, only to be met by an incredibly harsh job market. A generation was told that student loan repayments were nothing more than a small graduate tax and more than worth the amount of extra money you would be earning from entering the working world with a degree. They have been met by graduate salaries that have been unable to keep up with years of inflation and an ongoing cost-of-living crisis that makes any deductions from your wages increasingly difficult to manage.

Free and fully funded university education would irrefutably benefit society. Yet scrapping tuition fees seems utopian for a government that is more than willing to waste billions of pounds on wars and protecting the wealth of the super-rich. Tony Blair’s ‘New Labour’ introduced tuition fees in the first place, then the Tories and the Lib Dems created even more of a mess, which Starmer’s Labour has done nothing but preserve. Most of the graduates surveyed said they had no other choice but to take out student loans with hard to understand and unreasonable conditions. We need fully funded, free education with maintenance grants that students can actually live on, instead of loans. Student loan debt should be abolished, paid for by taking the wealth that the super-rich bosses make at all of our, including graduates, expense.