Sadly it’s not, mainly because of the way it’s marketed to us as 14-17 year olds. You’re obviously told about the debt, but at that age you don’t really understand the long-term repercussions, and even UCAS advisors just focus on the fact “you probably won’t pay it all back anyway”. My own student debt has now surpassed £85k with my masters, and £7k of that is interest alone, it’s pretty ridiculous tbh. I kinda started in the worst year because tuition fees were increased, I missed the final maintenance grants by a year, and the threshold for paying back the loan also got lowered whilst I was still at Uni.
The whole point of the changes initially were to make Uni “more accessible” to students like myself, from poor backgrounds, shit schools but still academically achieving the required grades. Whilst I benefitted because Exeter marginally lowered its grade boundary for me due to the school underperforming, I don’t really feel I benefitted from the financial side of system because as a “poor student” I essentially get lumped with the highest student debt out of everybody anyway. (Because they took away my grants)
Yes it is to mitigate the problem, and from their perspective I understand why they’ve lowered the threshold for that purpose. But I feel like they should either lowered the threshold and kept the same 30 year repayment period, or marginally increased the threshold when they made it a 40 year debt window. There’s a massive hit in earnings after 28k (pre-tax) is eclipsed, which in this day and age isn’t all that much in the first place. At £28k you’ll have 20% tax, 12% NI + 6% Postgraduate loan and 9% Undergraduate Loan all in effect. Thats going to have a quite an effect on those earning the very minimum for graduate jobs. We should be trying to encourage people to be educated, but the way we approach it atm is all wrong imo.
Sadly it’s not, mainly because of the way it’s marketed to us as 14-17 year olds. You’re obviously told about the debt, but at that age you don’t really understand the long-term repercussions, and even UCAS advisors just focus on the fact “you probably won’t pay it all back anyway”. My own student debt has now surpassed £85k with my masters, and £7k of that is interest alone, it’s pretty ridiculous tbh. I kinda started in the worst year because tuition fees were increased, I missed the final maintenance grants by a year, and the threshold for paying back the loan also got lowered whilst I was still at Uni.
The whole point of the changes initially were to make Uni “more accessible” to students like myself, from poor backgrounds, shit schools but still academically achieving the required grades. Whilst I benefitted because Exeter marginally lowered its grade boundary for me due to the school underperforming, I don’t really feel I benefitted from the financial side of system because as a “poor student” I essentially get lumped with the highest student debt out of everybody anyway. (Because they took away my grants)
Yes it is to mitigate the problem, and from their perspective I understand why they’ve lowered the threshold for that purpose. But I feel like they should either lowered the threshold and kept the same 30 year repayment period, or marginally increased the threshold when they made it a 40 year debt window. There’s a massive hit in earnings after 28k (pre-tax) is eclipsed, which in this day and age isn’t all that much in the first place. At £28k you’ll have 20% tax, 12% NI + 6% Postgraduate loan and 9% Undergraduate Loan all in effect. Thats going to have a quite an effect on those earning the very minimum for graduate jobs. We should be trying to encourage people to be educated, but the way we approach it atm is all wrong imo.