Yes.

On average, students graduate with £20,000 of debt. This is repaid when your earnings reach £15,000. Effectively, as a graduate you pay a 9% graduate tax on all earnings over £15,000 until your student debt is cleared. So, let’s say you’re earning £22,000 a year in your graduate job, you will be paying back £630 a year. In fact, until you’re earning £43,000, the ‘graduate premium’ will outweigh any student debt repayments.

‘Aha!’, the critics may snarl. ‘So the current system penalises successful graduates?’ Well, no. It’s difficult to earn £40,000 a year without degree. Try becoming a doctor, lawyer or engineer without a degree. Their graduate premiums are of course higher. Plus, they pay back their student debt quicker.

The fact is some degrees are worth more than others. Putting an exact figure on how a much a ‘degree’ earns you is pointless. Engineers and medics, for example, will nearly always earn more than history graduates. My degree has less of a premium as it gives me fewer valuable skills. I can’t build bridges or perform surgery; I can sift through lots of data and read quickly.

How fees are paid for should reflect this. Expensive degrees, with lots of teaching like engineering and medicine, should have higher fees paid for by a graduate tax on high earning graduates. It’s unfair that arts student have to pay the same as science students for considerably less teaching and resources. Students with these more expensive, skills based degrees tend to earn more as a result. They should thus pay enough fees to cover the actual costs of their degree, if they can afford to. Should doctors and engineers earning large salaries not chip in a little extra for their education? If not why not?

Related posts:

1. More student debt hyperbole
2. Student Debt: The Facts You Need To Know
3. Fees to rise to £7,000 after next election

Firstly, student debt is the cheapest type of debt. It’s inflation linked and thus you simply pay back the real value of what you’ve been given.

Headlines decrying debt nearly always ignore the fact that when you graduate, you get a qualification that sets you apart from over half the population – and if you bother to do well and get a 2.1 or first, you’ll be ahead of 75% of the population. And that if you do very well and get a first, you’ll be ahead of at least 90% of the population.

And, okay, £23,500 is a big figure if you have to pay it back all at once. But you don’t. Bailiffs don’t arrive at your digs the second you graduate and nick your television. If you earn £16,000 a year, you will pay back £90 a year. That’s less than £2 a week. When you earn £20,000, you will pay back £450 a year. That’s £8.50 a week, when you’re earning close to £400 gross. If you earn less than £15,000 you pay nothing.

The only possible consequence of constant gloom-mongering by bodies like the NUS is that poorer students will be scared off from university because of the debt. There are many reasons to not go to university, but debt simply isn’t one of them. Ignorance about the true cost of university – and how it is paid – is such that huge amounts of bursaries aimed at poorer students go unclaimed. This is the real disgrace. Organisations like Push.co.uk should concentrate on enticing poorer students into university, rather than doing its best to scare them off.

Related posts:

1. Student Debt: The Facts You Need To Know
2. Why shouldn’t medics and engineers pay higher fees?
3. Should universities be allowed to drown in debt?

After this there is the uncertain world of a shrinking job market and student debt. This year’s graduates are the first to go through university under the £3,000+ a year ‘top up’ fee system.

So instead of writing a generic ‘it’s so unfair’ piece, which I would dearly like to do, I’ve come up with five reasons to be cheerful:

1. Conversations with family and older general acquaintances no longer consist of them asking “How’s uni going?” followed by you having to think of something to say other than “I’m still getting drunk despite the workload, and I’ve started going to all the club nights I thought were shit in the first two years because I want to shag a fresher.”

Non-students don’t all talk about going to ASDA on Sunday and how they bought a new biro last week

2. You can go into a bar/pub/any retail outlet in a university town and honestly reply “No” when a member of staff says “Student are ya?” whilst making no attempt to conceal their disdain. Also no more drunk locals shouting at you for taking their taxes and staying in bed all day (unless you’re on the dole, see point 4).

3. Remember people over 25? Yes, they do exist, and they’re frequently nice chaps and chapesses. After three years of being surrounded almost entirely by the 18-22 age range you will be cast out into a world where not everyone is talking about exams and alco-pops. In turn the non-students don’t all talk about going to ASDA on Sunday and how they bought a new biro last week.

4. When you’re on the dole you get free dental care and even a few quid towards a pair of specs. You may not wear glasses, but your mother wasn’t lying when she said “doing that will turn you blind,” so you never know. Having spent about 18 months being attacked from inside by my wisdom teeth, I can’t wait to get some bloke who lacked the social skills to be a GP rooting around in my gob at the tax payers expense.

5. When the day is over, it’s really over – when you leave work there’s no extra work to do in the evening. When you leave the Job Centre there’s no going home to write a 500 word self-assessment of how your signing-on session went.

So there you have it, a few minor pleasures amid the despair. Now back to writing my article on how to choose the perfect corner to curl up and weep in, and my 20 point guide to seeing the worst of every situation.

Related posts:

1. Scrap the MA and face the recession

Students are taking to the latter choice in droves, which is good from the government’s point of view because it means they’ll all be going cap in hand to their parents or the banks to round up the £5,000 fees (plus living expenses).

But is a masters really the best idea? Well yes; if mummy and daddy will pay for it or you’ve got a few quid knocking about yourself.

Now the question becomes this: Is it really worth borrowing about £12,000 just to delay joining the piss-stained trackie bottoms and Special Brew crowd on the dole for one year? At this juncture I should point out that I have been on the dole before and I’m not some twat who gets his views of the unemployed from the Daily Telegraph – I’ve seen the trackie bottoms and I’ve smelled the piss.

Owing the government about £20,000 for my undergraduate degree is one thing, it doesn’t count in credit checks and the terms of paying it back are pretty liberal. But owing a bank tens of thousands could be potentially crippling when you graduate with your masters and are still no more employable than you would have been a year ago, you’re just really in debt. Before anyone comes out with a smart-arse comment about the government owning all the banks I should point out that that isn’t going to stop them from acting like bastards to those who owe them money.

Most of the MA courses aren’t going to offer people anything to make them more attractive to employers: “Your English Literature BA didn’t have much relevance to this job, but the human resources guys were really blown away by the useful skills you must have picked up with your ‘Literature of the English Speaking World’ MA.”

So, taking out a massive bank loan to do an MA is a silly way of avoiding standing in line for your weekly 50 quid as the dole office chimes to the sounds of 17-year-old Tina battering her numerous children round the head to keep then in order as she signs on.

If you’re going to piss several grand up the wall on something that will have little relevance to your future vocation why not get into debt by going on holiday? Go to Thailand and ‘find’ yourself, even if you don’t ‘find’ yourself you might find Gary Glitter there – sell the story to the Sun and you’ve recouped your costs already.

So, man up, wriggle out of the protective cocoon of education and face the recession. You’ll only kick yourself a few years down the line when you realise how much more debt you’ve taken on by delaying the inevitable by a year.

Related posts:

1. 5 Reasons to be cheerful about graduating
2. More student debt hyperbole
3. Why shouldn’t medics and engineers pay higher fees?

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And if you won’t take my word for it, have a listen to Martin Lewis – he of moneysavingexpert.com fame:

“Unless they finish their studies this July, students are among the least affected by the credit crunch right now. The student loan is the cheapest long-term debt they’ll ever have.”

Listen to Martin. It’s really not that bad, kids.

Related posts:

1. Credit crunch survival for just £500. Kind of.
2. Chomp, Chomp, Chomp: Students and the Credit Crunch…
3. Student Debt: The Facts You Need To Know

I am a second year journalism student at Liverpool John Moores University, and sometimes I don’t quite know how I arrived here.

To them, I was no-one other than a line of pretty good predicted grades and a way of making them look good.

Now don’t get me wrong, despite the fact that university has so far been a crazy rollercoaster of ups and downs with a Greek housemate who liked to smash plates on his birthday (understandable) that were not his own (not so understandable), to a different flat mate providing one of my pans as a sick bucket to a vomiting randomer she picked up on the way in one night, and a variety of other insane moments, I am quite glad I’m here.

But when I think about how I actually got here, the whole process befuddles me somewhat.

I was pressured into applying for university in September of my A-Level year. I had to make more decisions about what I wanted to do with the next three years of my life, when I in fact wasn’t capable of deciding if I wanted beans with my chips at lunch time or not. My college was a good one, and my tutor was a diamond, but he was pressured into pushing me into applying for uni because he was being pressured by the powers above to get us through the system.

To them, I was no-one other than a line of pretty good predicted grades and a way of making them look good.

I ended up making several rash decisions and applying at 8 theatre schools to do drama when that wasn’t really what I wanted to do. It was a whim that was acted on under pressure. As it happens, I changed my mind – after paying about £225 for auditions I didn’t go to – and opted for journalism.

In retrospect uni is probably doing me the world of good, but I just wonder how many other people were forced into making similar decisions, but now regret them so much. On the odd occasion, I ask myself: why journalism? And the main reason, to quote my dad, is simple: “because it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

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