Almost 6 years have passed since student protestors filled Parliament Square to express their frustration, anger and disillusionment at the Government’s decision to raise tuition fees to £9,000 a year.
They marched through London, the crowed filled the roads around Westminster and Whitehall, swelling and overflowing into surrounding areas. The Conservative Party’s Millbank headquarters were attacked, many were arrested and some were kettled outside Parliament long after dark.
The protestors held banners and placards which read ‘R.I.P Education’ and ‘Fund Our Future.’ The fee rise went ahead anyway and, in the years which have followed, maintenance grants which were once available to students from low income backgrounds have also been axed and replaced with a loan.
The established aspirational narrative for millennials, particularly the upwardly mobile middle classes, has been ‘work hard at school, go to university, get a “good” job, buy a house and start a family’ so you can be happier, more secure, more well educated and wealthier than your parents for over half a century.
Today the National Union of Students (NUS) have published a report called Double Jeopardy which calls that very narrative into question and asks whether it’s any longer viable. The findings are every bit as dramatic as the title would suggest.
The NUS have found that as many as 47% of people who graduated in 2015 still live with their parents six months after finishing. It’s official, this is the boomerang generation who fly the nest only to return again as soon as their studies are over.
2015 graduates are the first group of students to leave university after paying £9,000 a year for the privilege of being there following the controversial fee hike of 2010/11.
The report finds that 2015 graduates entering the job market with such a significant amount of debt are worried about what they owe. It also suggests that many do not believe their degree was worth the money they’ve paid for it. The graduates surveyed do not necessarily feel that their degree has improved their chances of getting a good job.
Today, the reality for almost half of graduates, those whose parents can’t morph into a bank and support them while they intern endlessly, or provide them with the necessary capital to put a deposit down on a house or sub them a few months’ rent while they get back up and running, is that expectations are failing to match up to reality.
When you take out any sort of loan you’re borrowing against an unknown: the future. Money is borrowed and it is expected to be paid back with interest. Student loans, taken out to cover tuition fees, are borrowed against the future earnings and job prospects of graduates.
The arguments for raising fees in 2010 were that graduates, in the end, earn more on average than people who don’t go to university. Therefore, the Government argued at the time, it’s only fair that they should pay higher fees. Think of the loan as a sort of advance on your future earnings, they said. Think of the repayments as a sort of advance on what you’re going to earn when you leave your university halls and walk into a graduate job and are greeted with a golden handshake.
Just last week the Universities Minister, Jo Johnson MP, wrote an open letter to students, which was received by The Debrief, and said that he believes this country’s higher education will ‘set you up for life.’ He wrote,
‘Going to university is still a big decision, and it’s a choice which more and more of you are making. We want that decision to pay off, to set you up for life, and our reforms will make sure universities do just that.’
One of the knock on effects of the so-called 'Great Recession'has been the reduced economic power of young people - millennials, Generation Y, Generation Rent, the Jilted Generation, the first generation to be worse off than its parents – or whatever you want to call us, because of economic circumstances beyond our control.
The NUS report also found that six out of ten students had outstanding consumer debt left over from their degree, which averaged £2,600 in the form of credit cards, overdrafts and other forms of borrowing. 46%, they said, reported accumulating further debt after leaving university.
In terms of work 52% were in full-time employment and 13% said they were working part time. Six out of ten were employed on permanent contracts, a quarter were on a fixed-term contract and 6% were on casual or zero-hours contracts.
Sorana Vieru, the NUS Vice President for Higher Education, said of the report: ‘This research shows many graduates are without work, badly paid or in precarious and casualised employment, especially women.’
‘The majority are in debt, not just with student loan repayments, but they also owe money to banks, credit card companies and loan sharks.’
‘The graduates face a double jeopardy: they enter the world of work having paid far more for their education, with the debts hanging over them. Yet they receive far less benefit from this education in the labour market compared to previous generations, while living costs keep rising and the welfare safety net is shrinking.’
All of this comes today as the Labour Party announced that they would reinstate student grants as well as the EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance), reversing the Conservative government’s abolition of both, if they were elected at the next General Election.
Angela Rayner, Labour’s Shadow Educations Secretary, said:
‘Today's commitment to restoring both EMA and student maintenance grants shows that while the Tories continue to burden our young people with debt, the Labour Party is committed to investing in our young people. It is only by investing in education that we can ensure that all of our young people, whatever their background, are able to succeed in whatever they aspire to.’
‘Reversing the Government's replacement of the student maintenance grant with loans would help over half a million students from low and middle income students to cover their living costs at university.’
‘When we can help improve the education of over a million young people with a small increase in corporation tax, it is an investment we would be foolish not to make.’
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.