A little news about student loans, why not? The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) recently pointed out that some undergraduates and graduates in England will pay up to 12% interest on their loans from September, before a fall in interest rates kicks in in March 2023, which will bring interest rates down (for now, anyway). This huge, short-term cost increase comes not long after changes to the entire system were announced, extending the time graduates have to repay their loans from 30 to 40 years and lowering the repayment threshold. Forty years of debt in exchange for "learning English, but a little more" seems pretty disproportionate to me, though maybe that's the point now.
Whenever something like this happens – a huge student funding fad that inevitably makes the decision of whether or not to attend college more fraught than ever, and it happens every few years like clockwork – I wonder what the end game is of all this. Do we want to stop intelligent people from getting smarter forever? Do we want everyone to be in debt forever? Is this the society we want to live in? Well, apparently, yes.
One of the problems here is that everyone in their thirties or older has their own deeply ingrained and outdated opinions about students, with the result that no one really seems to care what they are going through. These opinions tend to fall into three categories. First, you didn't go to university yourself and still got along fine, in which case you think students are work-shy dilettantes who need a humiliating day of hard work to sort them out (that's fine, you may think that). Another train of thought is not exactly anti-learning but anti-student, very much stuck in the Ben Elton and Viz idea of the late 80s of students where they always wear very embarrassing hats and are right. We don't like politics that involve empathy in this country, so it has a large constituency. The third and, in my opinion, most important way to think about students is this enormous, soul-devouring self-shrug: you remember how personally unbearable you were as a student – you wore that charity store suit jacket everywhere you went! You idiot! – and you want to prevent modern students from making the same personality mistakes you did, and you can only justify that by burdening them with decades of debt. Realistically, I do back that up. I wouldn't choose to financially support the 20 year version of me either. He slept in jeans and ate pot noodles for breakfast. A dirty little boy.
But without those three years in college, I simply would not have grown into the long paragraph genius you love to read today, and in these student loan debacles, the fact that a college education is very often just a good thing in itself seems to be lost in the neologism of "it's just a college tax" and "how else would you pay for it?". Some people become the best version of themselves through college, others thrive best when they go straight into a job, and some people find their feet in the churning waters of the workplace. There are many people who fall through the gaps between these broad options, but for the most part, the university works for those who go. And yet in England we seem actively determined to make it as expensive and daunting as possible.
It's now not just three years of making bolognese in a stir-fry, a brief and intense friendship with a French woman, Pound-a-Pint night, and writing essays in the cool dark mist of the night. Now the decision you might make at 17 to go to college has to fall matter, every ounce of it; the whole thing has become a lifetime mortgage bill with your future self hanging in the balance. Nice two As and a B at A level you got there … it would be a shame if the only viable way to do anything with it is to take on tens of thousands of pounds of ever increasing debt that we change how and when we want to.
This won't be the last student loan disaster and not yet the most significant, but it will be a footnote on the later Wikipedia page about how the entire higher education system in England collapsed while Nick Clegg watched from California in VR goggles. In recent years, the politics of England have become an ever sharper war between the old who were doing well and the young who never really will, and this kind of ill-considered generational punishment is now the order of the day. A reminder if you haven't dipped your toe in the job market hell lately: You need a degree to qualify for an entry-level job archiving in a dimly lit office in a major city in the U.K. How about we change that? If not, we will get closer and closer to a system where only the 7 or so.000 Oxford and Cambridge graduates get to do anything at all each year and the rest of us just till the fields