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    Almost 1.8m people owe £50,000 or more in student debt
    United Kingdom

    Almost 1.8m people owe £50,000 or more in student debt

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    1. Enzonia on

      I think my student debt is somewhere in the ballpark of £130,000 these days – the result of getting through 6 year of medicine with two years out for health reasons. I’m now working full time and paying several hundred a month, yet the number keeps going up… Our current student loan system just seems like an incredibly inefficient way of doing a graduate tax – plus one that detrimentally targets lower earners.

    2. Status_Asparagus_178 on

      that feels… extremely normal?
      3x 9.5k = £28.5k
      + 3x 5k for maintenance loan = £43.5k

      the interest is tied to inflation. We’ve had like, 5% inflation the last few years on average, so that’s like 2k per year, so if you don’t get a job related to your degree you’d expect £50k within a few years.

      Not to mention if you do a foundation year, that’s an extra 14k off the bat, so you *start off* with more than 50k debt, before we even get into interest.

      Or, if you get more in maintenance loans because your parents are broke.
      or if you do a postgrad.

      edit: why the fuck does reddit interpret “+” as markdown syntax for a bulleted list?

    3. Critical-Engineer81 on

      After a certain amount it just a tax. Broken system were a private company are making fuck tonne of money from it.

    4. pasta_and_lobster on

      At least it’s not the 6 figures that the US students owe, seems like a pretty normal amount?

    5. AcademicIncrease8080 on

      And so much of that has added basically no “value add” to the economy. Employers don’t need or care about the hundreds of thousands of graduates with low value degrees in things like Criminology, Psychology, Media Studies, Marketing, Sociology, Politics, English (and especially not when those degrees are from low to mid ranking universities).

      It’s only meaningful if it’s either a mostly vocational course such as medicine or if it’s from a top university such as Cambridge (and even then the degree but is often irrelevant to the job, it’s just a form of intelligence signalling)

      The whole thing is massively dysfunctional, young people loading up on high interest debt which weighs down their earnings and often is simply not really needed for work. And then the taxpayers will foot the bill for the tens of billions of debt that’s never repaid.

    6. Testing18573 on

      I remember being angry about student loans as I was one of the first years to have to them. Walked out of undergrad with £12k debt on a plan 1.

      Now it seems very lucky compared to those who came later. All three major parties have became obsessed with the idea that higher education should make money, not create a more skilled population which helped the economy over the longer term. The coalition plan (current plan 2) is especially insane as they knew at the time it would loose money.

    7. markhalliday8 on

      To think, my final year of uni was in the pandemic. I did a practice based course and the industry I was meant to go into shut down meaning I had to completely retrain.

      I now owe almost one hundred thousand pounds. Uni even billed me for the final year, which they literally wouldn’t let me attend. I still got a degree, but it was completely worthless. How they were allowed to bill me for that final year I will never know..

    8. NaturalDisaster2582 on

      People on these comments saying this is “normal” but we have some of the highest student loan debt in the world with a stagnating economy where it’s increasingly difficult to get a job, cost of living is so hard that people are living with their parents into their 30’s which has reduced people’s ability to find work in other cities which would boost their career and their social mobility. 

      This isn’t normal, except here.

    9. CrapAds on

      I look forward to Labour improving things with their vague and unspecified plan.

    10. SBOSlayer on

      I was lucky to leave at 25k debt, when interest was low. Still quiet a bit to go, but at least the 1st 10 years weren’t astronomical interest rates. I’m now paying back and half of my payments are interest – would be cheaper to get a commercial loan.

      If you take an indivudal who will pay it off. The govt is making a profit, but not as a whole.

      Makes me sick the idea that if it was a different time it could have nearly been 100k.

      System is broken, if want to support the development of skills that do need a degree. Again, the young being shafted. Absolutely disgusting for doctors.