IN 2017, when Nuala, then 18, from west London, got into Leeds University to study architecture, she didn’t give too much thought to taking out a student loan.
“It’s just part of the process of going to uni, everyone does it, so you don’t really think that deeply about it,” she tells me from Cambridge, where she is completing the final year of her integrated masters. “I just signed up. For most people, it’s the only option.”
Fast forward almost seven years, and Nuala, now 25, owes just over £93,000 to the Student Loans Company and she still hasn’t finished her degree.
“You inspired me to log in [to Student Finance England] and check the balance today,” she says. “I just looked and it and laughed. If you don’t laugh you’ll cry. I always used to make jokes like, ‘I’ll be in £100k of debt when I leave uni’, but now seeing that that’s actually true… that’s a whole house deposit of debt, it’s crazy.”
Nuala is one of 1.8 million students who are in at least £50,000 of UK student debt, according to a BBC investigation last month.
The report also found that more than 61,000 have balances of above £100,000, according to figures from the Student Loans Company (SLC), while another 50 people owe upwards of £200,000.
In 2012, the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government tripled the tuition fee cap, raising it to £9,250 a year (despite the Lib Dems having famously built their 2010 election campaign around a pledge to abolish tuition fees). England now has the highest undergraduate tuition fees in the developed world, according to the OECD.
Student loan terms have also been made less favourable — interest rates now sit at almost eight per cent for anyone who started university between 2012 and 2022, and the loan cancellation date was increased first to 30 and now 40 years after graduation.
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