Student loan repayments are completely unfair

Any loan scheme where the money is not expected to be fully paid back should be viewed with suspicion IMO. It's the most terrible mess, and they have managed to make a system intended to benefit millions of people feel like a soul- destroying burden.

I read that all your debt is counted as a government asset, so don't expect them to sort it out any time soon.

@CleanQueen123 Of course it has to be a loan and not free money! How are universities to get money? From everyone and every entity paying tax? For 37% of school leavers and others who just feel like going? It’s not sustainable to not charge everyone unless uni numbers going are drastically reduced. In today’s world, £1800 a year is a decent sum but would you have the job you have without your degree? Probably not. We could turn the clock back and have 20% going. Much cheaper to run the system then. Costs came with massive expansion of the sector and we cannot have it all.

But I think that's my point, if it's not expected that you'll clear the debt, why make it a loan? I'm currently paying about £150/month which would really make a difference to my finances if I wasn't.

@CleanQueen123 You are not expected to clear it though are you? Never ever been an expectation. You just pay a bit of your salary. If you didn’t get a great job after your degree, so bit it, but lower earners really don’t pay much and it has no relationship whatsoever to the amount borrowed.

If you are 45 you will have paid a fraction of what students today pay it's just not comparable.
People often graduated with barely 10k of debt back then - now £50-60k is unavoidable given that £30k alone is just fees then it's pretty hard to live on less than £8-10k per year given high rental costs and high food costs. Students these days have to absolutely scrimp to manage and parents typically have to chip in hundreds a month on top too.

I'm Plan 1, graduated in 2013. So far I've paid the grand total of £1700 off. I'm now in the position of barely covering my bills. That money going out every month to chip away at a debt I'll never manage to clear because of the interest is frustrating.

You get sold the dream of a degree resulting in a highly paid career and the loan repayments being a small "tax" at an age when you're unlikely to understand the real consequences.

Except didn’t you only pay like £9k for an entire degree on plan 1? My Plan 2 was £47k when I left and i now owe £67k. I’ve been paying it for 8 years and paid back about £12k.

I mean it's fine to take that attitude but don't act surprised when there's no teachers because no-one's prepared to go into debt AND do a challenging job AND never earn enough to pay it off AND not to be able to move out of a house share.

That's the position younger colleagues are in and I feel sorry for them.

How else would you have funded your university course?

They weren’t ‘misdild’ as a student tax - that’s all Martin Lewis’s doing who has always encouraged them. Surely you looked into the implications of going in to debt? Perhaps not so much as an 18 year old but mine is only too aware of the mounting debt. I am astonished when I read on WIWIKAU how ignorant some parents are: that interest is charged from the day the loan is paid out, even the fact that university costs so much money in the first place!
I went to uni in the USA so uni here seems very cheap to me. There people are well aware and if possible start saving from the day their kid is born, and there too there are loans that are being paid off decades later.
Whst do you suggest? Universities cost more money than they get from home students - they do rely a lot on overseas students. The government is hardly awash with money.
If I had the money I’d pay for my DD without a loan.

Some of them are, especially the plan 2 which is the one mainly in the news. DS was very fortunate to have missed this by a year, he went in 2011 so was on plan 1 which wasn't bad at all and the fees were less as well.

5 years is not long enough. This is £40,000 worth of fees! What about everyone else we value! What about less well paid in other areas of work? We should not divide society like this.

That already happens with the golden hellos but no-one would last 5 years. So I think it could work!

A downside could be that you have people working as teachers just for this benefit and doing a terrible job because they don't really care about being a teacher.

I forgot to add that I was also a bit annoyed because my husband had to write a letter to them confirming that he was supporting me and paying our bills, and they also wanted to see a bank statement showing this!

My loan is supposed to be repaid through PAYE if I earn a certain amount in a month. They had sent letters saying that they been informed that I wasn’t working, so I’m not sure why they needed my husband to get involved!

I've recently done this, having also been penalised for early career low earnings, mat leave and working part time for several years when DC were pre school. I also believe it's indirect discrimination against women.

I've put a complaint in to the SLC and written to my MP, we shall see what comes of it.

The last statement I had showing interest for my plan 1 loan was in 2017. Around £2500 had been added to my loan in interest since I graduated in 2001. I’d paid off nowhere near that amount.

I haven’t had a statement since then so I dread to think what it is now.

I’ve taken time out of work to look after my DC. I was very academic but I realised I’m not a career person - I worked to live.

I think I will do the same plan 1 also.

Indeed because it wasn’t, I borrowed £20,000 I barely touched it in my 20s due to low earnings, maternity leave etc, but very little was added onto it. I think the worst year I had £300 added to it. That’s not crippling interest, loans borrowed from public funds still need some kind of interest to keep up with inflation (with the current model at least) or it’s not a loan if you’re paying back less than you borrowed.

We always knew student loans were a gamble in that if you didn’t utilise your degree, you were still liable to pay it. You have to be very low earning to be in a situation where interest is outstripping payments on plan 1. Hence the later cut off age for viability.

I don't think Plan 1 was crippling at all. I paid my off on a teacher's salary many years ago.

How many moaning about student debt on here voted for Tory governments I wonder?

The whole thing is ridiculous and how it’s measured against parental income. So someone with parents who are low paid are saddled with far more debt than those who have parents earning more through no fault of their own.
the poorest to start with then end up with the most debt to pay back

@Sammy900 what’s your ‘crippling interest’ been on plan 1? The interest was very low for the first 10 years, it went up a bit post Truss, but is only 3% ish now.

I have an original plan 1 so paying it off until I'm 65 and a plan 2 because I retrained.

Obviously it was my choice to do another degree and I knew that would increase my loans.

But it's such a trap isn't it. Plus you don't get to decide where your payments go off you have more than one loan. So at the moment my payments are all getting directed to my plan 2 so my plan 1 keeps getting bigger. But my plan 2 would be written off before my plan 1. So basically the whole system is designed to keep getting money from you for as long as possible.

As women we tend to be disproportionately affected too. Mat leave and bring more likely to work part time when our kids are young leader is with spiraling debt where men who become fathers are more likely to increase their earnings and therefore pay off their loans.

I'm happy for university to cost something and for there to be a loan agreement but our current set up is ridiculous.

I don't think the concept of taking a loan and repayment as you earn more is so bad, but it's the interest payments they need to sort out and reduce. 2 percent interest is enough.