“You’ll never get another loan like it,” my college tutor told me, reassuringly, when I was 18. He was right, though not in the way he intended. Aside from a mortgage, it’s unlikely I will ever take on a debt with interest rates this high, a repayment window this long, or such power to shape my adult life. Student loans weren’t just misunderstood by teenagers like me; they were actively downplayed and sold as harmless.
Like many British teenagers from working-class backgrounds – current stats put the number of first-gen UK uni students at 651,965 – I was the first in my family to go to university. Both my parents left school without finishing, and as far as anyone could tell, no one on either side had gotten to college. All this meant that my acceptance letter was greeted exclusively with adulation. We knew nothing about loans or league tables — and don’t even ask me about “red bricks” or “polytechnics,” because I only learned about those after I’d graduated.
Student loans weren’t just misunderstood by teenagers like me; they were actively downplayed and sold as harmless.
Fortunately, or so I thought, I had plenty of tutors who could provide some guidance, and all of them, without exception, guided me in the direction of a student loan. Coming from a low-income, single-parent household meant I instantly qualified for the maximum amount, and I was encouraged to take as much as I could get. This is how it was framed: as if I’d be lining my coffers with the public purse, rather than taking on a tremendous debt with no real plan as to how I might repay it, let alone what I would be paying on top. Interest rates? That simply was not in my teenage vernacular.
I don’t blame my tutors. I think they were probably just parroting the student loan playbook. It does bother me, though, that knowing I came from a family that qualified for free school meals — a benefit so shamed in my school that I never once used it — and later EMA, no one ever mentioned I might qualify for a bursary. Instead, I was encouraged — like approximately 909,000 other students in the academic year 2010/11 — to take out a student loan: “You won’t even pay it back until you’re earning enough,” was the party line.
And so, I find myself in the unfortunate — but not at all uncommon — situation of having graduated in 2013 to a debt of 26592.43 and, 13 years later, still owing £21,907.18.
A quick roll call of peers reveals a similarly dismal situation. “I’ve supposedly only paid off 4k, but with interest, we know I’ve paid more,” says Isabella Silvers, 32. Like me, Silvers is a journalist who graduated to a debt of just over £25,000 and, sadly, also like me, now has a debt of a little over £21,000 despite over a decade of chipping away at it. “I don’t even know how to find that information,” was the response that came from another friend — several, in fact — who have taken the “ignorance is bliss” approach to their mounting debt.
All of this feels almost quaintly British. We call queues “orderly,” bullying is “building character,” and now student loans have been dubbed a “graduate contribution,” or “graduate tax.” This makes it sound like a helpful donation to the nation rather than what many of us now recognise as a compounding financial trap.
The cruel irony is that the people most affected by ballooning student debt are often those the system claimed to help. Students from less wealthy backgrounds borrow more, rely on maintenance loans, and have less family cushioning when repayments begin to bite.
The problem isn’t that we borrowed money. The problem is that we did exactly what we were told: study hard, invest in education, aim high. All under the belief that student loans weren’t like other debts — that we’d only repay if we earned enough, that any leftover balance would be written off, and that the debt wouldn’t even count against future additional debts, like mortgages.
And yet here we are, poorer than those who came before, struggling more than those who could afford to forgo a loan altogether.
Fast-forward to 2026, and many graduates on the far steeper Plan 2 are watching their balances rise even as their payslips say otherwise. For students whose university courses began in or after September 2012, their interest is accruing faster than repayments can chase it down.
Jessica Fortune, 28, is staring down a debt of £92,265.35, and in the four and a half years since she graduated, her interest has risen £2,566.10.
What makes this feel especially cruel is not just the numbers — though the numbers are eye-watering — but the sense of having been mis-sold a future. Many of us will repay for decades. Many could repay more than they borrowed. More still will never clear the balance at all. If, like me, you were paid the first loan on or after 1 September 2006, your debt will be written off 25 years after the April you were first due to repay. For graduates of the £9,000-fees era, that cut-off point sits at 30 years.
And yes, technically, the system is income-contingent, but the debt, contrary to the common narrative, is precisely that: a debt. “The student loan system here is predatory. I was shocked when I moved here that people thought it was normal,” remembers Sarah Waldron, 37, who stayed in Ireland for her studies. I shuddered in recognition, thinking back to how normalised taking on that debt felt as an 18-year-old.
I’d held onto that belief until I went freelance almost ten years after I graduated, when I realised just how much I’d paid compared to how much I’d actually paid off. It’s a statistic that hasn’t shifted now that I’m back in-house. Take my last month’s statement, for example, which shows that I paid £608 towards my student loan but accrued £618 in interest.
“Roughly for every £300 I paid each month to my student loan in the 2024–2025 financial year, £160-ish was added in interest,” explains Laura, 35, who graduated in 2013 to a debt of £39,220.80 and still has £28,090.64 left to pay, despite a successful career as Head of Marketing in EdTech. “I have grafted and grafted to earn good money, I’m very savvy with my finances, etc., and yet I still owe two-thirds of my loan back?” she wonders.
The debt that at first felt vanishingly unreal suddenly feels like a heavy weight shouldered by a generation. It shapes how we think about taking risks, starting families, buying homes — and even what kind of adulthood is possible.
Politically, the discomfort is becoming harder to ignore. The Financial Times is questioning whether student loans are set to be the next mis‑selling scandal. Martin Lewis has called Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ decision to freeze the salary threshold at which graduates start repaying Plan 2 student loans “not a moral thing to do.”
When graduates who have done everything “right” still feel financially stuck, something has gone wrong. If higher education is genuinely a public good — as we’ve been told it is, endlessly — then its costs shouldn’t fall so heavily on those with the least room to absorb long-term risk.
I’m tired of being told we live in a meritocracy when all around me I see signs of the opposite. If that story is to remain believable, student finance needs more than to be a talking point. It’s one thing for students to bury their heads in the sand, but it’s quite another for our leaders to do the same.
We can’t keep acting as if time alone will make this problem disappear. For millions of graduates, time is what is being taken from them.