Growing anger over the plight of millions of graduates saddled with ballooning student loan debts is threatening to develop into a fresh crisis for the government, with Martin Lewis leading the demands for an urgent rethink.
The MoneySavingExpert founder has been critical of the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, over a change to repayment thresholds affecting 5.8 million people who took out a student loan between 2012 and 2023.
Dozens of graduates – most on the affected plan 2 repayment plans – responded to a Guardian callout about student loans. Here are some of their stories.
‘I’ll never be able to get rid of it’
Amy Cayzer, a 24-year-old communications officer working in the charity sector, graduated in 2023 with a first-class degree. She has already watched her student debt rise by tens of thousands of pounds thanks to interest rates that have been as high as 8%.
Cayzer, who is from a low-income family and was the first to go to university, graduated with £73,814 of debt. This has increased to £93,793, and “will soon exceed £100,000”.
“It’s overwhelming to realise that, even though I’m paying every month, it doesn’t make a difference to what I owe. It takes away all hope that you’ll ever be able to pay it off,” she says. “This is going to be with me for 30 years … I’ll never be able to get rid of it, no matter how much I pay towards it.”
Friends from wealthier backgrounds, she says, “didn’t have to pay as much back”, often because their parents subsidised them. “That just perpetuates inequalities,” Cayzer says.
She was 17 when she first began looking into student finance and 18 when she signed up for it. She says the scale and longevity of the debt was not fully explained. “The way it was explained, it didn’t really capture the long-term nature of it,” she says. “It was underplayed.”
While she does not regret going to university, she says the burden now feels “disheartening” – and worries it may deter others from similar backgrounds.
‘I’ll repay £100,000 to £150,000’
Jo’s* student loan debt is about to break through the £100,000 barrier, “which is a horrible milestone”.
The music teacher studied at a top London conservatoire between 2013 and 2017. Since 2024 they have been doing a master’s degree in music education.
This week, Jo’s outstanding student loan debt stood at £99,987. Their plan 2 undergraduate loan accounts for the vast majority of that – £93,335 – while £6,000 or so relates to a postgraduate loan.
Jo, who lives and works in London, originally borrowed £62,000 to finance an undergraduate degree, and interest began to be added in September 2013 when the course started.
By April 2018, courtesy of the interest added every month, their debt had swelled to £70,722, and by April 2023 it had exceeded £82,000.
“I worked out once using an online calculator that I’ll repay approximately £100,000 to £150,000 over the 30 years of my loan,” says Jo.
“I feel deeply, unavoidably betrayed by the fact that the older generations pay no ‘graduate tax’, and yet for wanting to better myself, I am forced to pay a massive chunk out of my income if I work harder to begin saving for a home.
“My partner and I are left trapped with high rents and a high cost of living, and working more or doing a second job to try to put money aside is now not worth the energy and stress it causes due to a regressive, unfair taxation model. I have nothing against a graduate tax in principle – just apply it to everyone equally if you studied in the UK in the last 70 years, not just young people.”
Jo adds: “I believe funding study from general taxes is a good thing for the UK and despise the older generations who went to university for not paying their share and lumping it all on my generation.”
‘I don’t want to earn any more’
William Pratt, a 29-year-old data analyst from Cambridge with a PhD, graduated from his undergraduate degree course in 2018 with a student loan debt of £56,000. Now he owes almost £90,000. “It’s hopeless. I’m never going to pay it off,” he says.
As well as his original student loan, Pratt borrowed more than £10,000 to do a postgraduate course. His combined repayments are close to £300 a month, which he says is money that could otherwise be used to meet basic living costs. “We would be better-off [by] £200 [or] £300 a month,” he says. “That’s my gas paid for, that’s my electric paid for, that’s my car payment paid for.”
The strain has hardened into resentment. “I definitely have felt, over the years, a growing anger towards the older generation,” Pratt says, pointing to the triple lock on pensions. Hearing the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, describe the system as fair, is “very, very hard to take”.
Even as a higher earner, Pratt says the system actively discourages career progression. “I don’t want to earn any more money,” he says, after calculating how much wouldgo to tax, pension contributions and his student finance payments. “Ultimately the system is unsustainable.”
‘I’m paying £856 a month – more than my mortgage’
Daniel, a 28-year-old engineer from Newcastle, pays £856 a month towards his student loans. His latest payslip showed £491 deducted for his undergraduate loan and £365 for his postgraduate loan.
Daniel graduated in 2020, as the pandemic hit, and chose to do a master’s degree rather than enter a collapsing job market. “I viewed it as a way of pressing pause on life while things sorted themselves out,” he says. He knew the terms were worse than those on his first loan and that he would be adding more to what he already owed.
His total debt has climbed to about £83,000. Only after a recent pay rise did the balance begin to fall by about £50 a month.
“We were told, as impressionable teenagers preparing to enter adulthood, that the loans would be barely noticeable,” he says. Instead, he now sees the system as “functionally a tax on not being rich enough to pay outright for a university education”.
If young people were not making repayments and had more disposable income, he says, it would be spent and circulated rather than “just being hoovered” out of the economy. “It’s crap for me, it’s crap for the country and it’s crap for everyone else.
“It’s no wonder young people are so disillusioned with politics.”
‘We were sold these loans when we were children’
“We were sold these loans when we were only 17, so legally considered children,” says Nicole, who studied classics at Durham University.
The first member of her family to go to university, Nicole feels she was lied to.
She says the advice from teachers was that the loans would be a tiny percentage of their pay, and it was unlikely they would be repaid in full, with the outstanding balance written off after 30 years.
Now in her early 30s, she works in the heritage sector and earns £35,000 a year. Her monthly repayment is nearly £150, which is money she “could really do with”.
Based in Teesside, she bought a house in 2020, and initially it was “doable” financially. “However, with the cost of living increase and my mortgage renewal last year, I’ve had to decrease my pension contribution to keep myself afloat,” she says.
“I left university with £58,000 of debt, and it now stands at £72,000. I checked it a few months ago and, though I repaid £965 between April and October, the interest (to cover a plan 2 loan and partial master’s loan) added was £1,669.”
“I wouldn’t mind the £150-a-month payment if the loan amount was actually going down. It is the fact that it never decreases that feels the most unfair … Mortgages or bank loans don’t work like that. People only a few years ahead of me had fees of just £3,000 a year.”
‘I feel a bit cheated’
Rebecca, who lives in Lancashire, was part of the first plan 2 student loan cohort: she studied land economy at Cambridge University between 2012 and 2015. She got some financial help via a bursary and left university with about £35,000 of debt. “I don’t know what it is now – I don’t want to look!” she says.
Rebecca, 39, says: “We were told these loans were index-linked with low interest attached, so little real-terms growth in debt. However, no one told us they would keep limiting the threshold at which repayments apply. RPI [inflation] April 2016 to April 2026 was around 53%, but the threshold has only risen 35%. This situation is set to worsen, too, with the budgetary changes announced in November … I feel a bit cheated because this is not what we expected.”
She says for mums with childcare costs, “work doesn’t pay” when you have to repay 9% of everything you earn above the income threshold.
“It does operate like a graduate tax [and] I feel that what I pay is really impacting my marginal tax rate,” she says. “I work four days a week, and I wouldn’t go to five because I’d lose half of it.”
* Name has been changed
