Student loans, do they get paid off?

[TaraKnowles]

I heard an article on the radio today saying that the current way of having student loans was the worst for both worlds. In that the amount students can borrow is too high, but that for a middle earning professional, they would never pay it back.
Is it worth our children taking student loans, would a nurse or teacher today ever pay them back in full?

What I object to strongly is that at the age of eighteen (in most cases), before they've had full-time jobs and major money management responsibilities, students are led into a huge debt burden and sold the idea that it's ok, they may never have to pay the loan back. So they start adult life saddled with a debt (which is a debt for most of their working life whichever way you look at it) and then it is implied that they may get away with not honouring this debt fully. The impact of this on their attitude to finances is not healthy. My DD says so many students she knows have a very blasé attitude to the debt they are racking up because everyone is so anxious to tell them (presumably so that they meekly accept these high fees) that it's not a real debt. Consequently many are taking out more of the loan than they need, given parental help (not DD!)

I wasn't born in UK, and have to say I've always been a bit at british attitudes to borrowing. Surely this set-up is only going to exacerbate the debt culture here? If people have never known freedom from debt as adults they are going to find it a lot easier to slide into bigger debts.

I agree Coffee. After the credit crunch you would think we would want to encourage our youngsters to be savers not debt ridden. If it were of an affordable level where repayments could be expected to be cleared (i.e the £3k loans with repayments at £15k income) then it wouldn't be quite so bad.

titchy as i understand it the money to universities is unchanged, instead of grants to university, they are funded through fees, so the cost to the taxpayer is unchanged

Yeah that's sort of how it work carol - we still get grants to cover the cost of courses that cost more than we can charge in fees. However in order to charge the £9k a year most charge, they have to agree to use a lot of that fee income in bursaries. Fees have also remained the same since the higher fee was introduced in 2012 - there is no mechanism for charging more, even though staff, pension (another thread!) and infrastructure costs have gone up.