In utterly sad but true news, three quarters of graduates could still be paying for their education in their fifties.
The all-too-believable stats are part of a research project from the Sutton Trust, set out to work out the implications of student tuition fees tripling to a whopping £9,000 a year when the coalition government came to power.
It calculated that while previously students would leave uni with loans of £24,000, now the figure (including tuition fees and the costs of living off super noodles for three years) is likely to be £44,000. When you take into account those loans are subject to interest rates of 3 per cent, they reckon the average graduate would be in line to repay £66,897. Gulp.
Of course, there are those people who earn enough to pay it off in one fell swoop in the first few years of graduation. But most of us are subject to the new repayments system that means you don't start paying it off until you earn £21,000 – and the repayments are staggered based on your earnings. 'The new system benefits graduates who earn very little in their lifetime,' says Conor Ryan, director of research at the Sutton Trust, of people who go to uni but then happen to never make enough to repay any of their loan.
But the people who are really going to feel the brunt are the professionals who don't earn that much, but do earn enough to qualify for student loan repayments – repayments that sure are set lower than before, but are therefore spread out over a longer period of time. 'There has been a lot said about the lower repayments that graduates make in their 20s under the new loan system, but very little about the fact that many graduates will face significant repayments through their 40s, whereas many would previously have repaid their loans by then,' says Ryan. ‘But for many professionals, such as teachers, this will mean having to find up to £2,500 extra a year to service loans at a time when their children are still at school and family and mortgage costs are at their most pressing.'
It all seems very bleak – a life committed to paying off instalments of money with ever-rising interest rates for a degree that might never have got you the job you wanted. But if there's any positive in all this, it's that no one set out to make these findings just to annoy people.
Hopefully, now that the stats are there, something will be done. Some bright spark MP might sit up and take notice and re-jig all the finances, or magic up a plan to get all graduates into decent jobs. Especially since the Government has admitted they don't expect 45 per cent graduates to ever fully pay back their student loans – and warned that if that percentage reaches 48% it means introducing £9,000 a year fees will have cost the government more than it's made them.
Hmm. Fingers crossed.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.