The average day school fee is £6,226 a term before VAT, which is about £22,400 a year once the 20 per cent is added.
Couple that with the coming boomer wealth transfer, and it was always going to be the case that the rich would just start opting out of the student loan system altogether.
And they are, according to the Sunday Times. It says that more than 110,000 students at “elite universities” were able to turn down the maintenance loan in 2024-25, and “some have their tuition paid too”.
The piece says that around one in twenty English students don’t take a maintenance loan, or a loan for their tuition fees, “according to a House of Commons briefing”. It also claims that just under a third (“equal to about 113,523”) don’t take out a maintenance loan at Russell Group universities.
The problem? It’s absolute twaddle.
Cut and shut
The SLC doesn’t publish take-up figures anymore (something something data futures) and so the paper has had to do some cutting and shutting of datasets.
And it just so happens that every figure in the piece – right down to the 113,523 – is exactly what you get if you divide SLC’s maintenance loan count by HESA’s count of all full-time England-domiciled students – postgraduates included.
| Article’s claim | SLC maintenance loans ÷ HESA full-time, all levels | SLC maintenance loans ÷ HESA full-time undergraduates |
|---|---|---|
| 113,523 don’t take a maintenance loan | 113,523 (358,320 − 244,797) | 63,448 |
| 32 per cent don’t take one in 2024-25 | 31.7 per cent | 20.6 per cent |
| 29 per cent five years ago (2019-20) | 29.5 per cent | 16.6 per cent |
| Fewer than half take one at LSE, Imperial and UCL | 44, 45 and 46 per cent | 63, 62 and 71 per cent |
| 72 per cent take one at Warwick | 71.7 per cent | 78.6 per cent |
| 82 per cent take one at Cardiff | 82.0 per cent | 87.3 per cent |
Yep, about 50,000 of the article’s 113,523 “non-takers” are full-time postgraduates. Undergraduate maintenance loans don’t apply to them, apart from a few thousand PGCE trainees. Around 21,000 of them took a master’s or doctoral loan from SLC instead, and most of the 23,000 research students are funded by studentships, so not borrowing says nothing about family wealth.
Pleading the fifth
So the real figure is about one in five Russell Group undergraduates from England not taking a maintenance loan, up from about one in six in 2019-20. That’s 63,000, not “more than 110,000”.
The headline gets worse. SLC’s tables show 94 per cent of fee-loan takers at these universities also take the maintenance loan – 261,385 England-domiciled students took a fee loan in 2024-25 against 244,797 taking a maintenance loan, so those avoiding loans altogether come to something like one in seven.
The London universities come out lowest on the paper’s numbers because they have the most postgraduates – which is all UCL’s 25-point gap between the two calculations is. On the real numbers they’re still near the bottom, likely because London also has a lot of Muslim students drumming their fingers on the table waiting for Sharia-compliant student finance, which still has no launch date.
The trend survives the correction, and is a bit steeper – non-take-up went from 16.6 to 20.6 per cent. Postgraduate numbers barely moved over the period, so almost all of the rise in the article’s non-takers is undergraduates – postgrads just dilute it.
I should say at this stage that my take-up figure is a bit high and a bit low all at the same time. It’s a little too high because SLC’s maintenance loan count includes PGCE students, who get the loan, but HESA counts them as postgraduates, so they’re missing from the undergraduate base. This matters most at UCL (the IOE) and the other big teacher-training providers. It’s a little too low because HESA’s England-domiciled count still includes people who can’t get a loan at all, like students without settled status or with previous HE study.
Neither moves the overall figure far from one in five.
Accrued interest
The rest of the article is all over the place too. The “one in twenty” line is supposedly from the Commons Library, but it actually reports a 95 per cent take-up of fee loans and 91 per cent of maintenance loans in 2021/22, the last year SLC could estimate it. So about one in eleven skipped the maintenance loan then.
It quotes an “average maintenance loan” of £7,678, but that matches nothing SLC has published – its own figures are £7,690 for 2023/24 and a provisional £7,410 for 2024/25. It also quotes £61,000 and £77,000 living cost figures, credited to Nationwide – but they actually appear to come from the minimum income standard that HEPI, TechnologyOne and Loughborough published in August 2025.
It quotes a £47,900 average debt for “students graduating in 2026”. Nope, that’s the 2026 repayment cohort – people who became liable in April 2026, mostly those who left in 2025, non-completers included. Plan 2 covers anyone who started before August 2023, not “between 2012 and 2022”. And the maintenance grants “returning” in 2028-29 top out at £1,000 a year, for households under £25,000 – tapering out at £30,000 – on industrial strategy courses only.
The piece cites Ariane de Gayardon’s research to claim that privately educated students were twice as likely to go to university with no loan. Her research does find women slightly less likely to borrow, but the published summary puts privately educated students 5.5 percentage points less likely to borrow, and its sample entered university by 2010, when fees were £3,000.
We do need a debate in this country about who pays for higher education – both the split between state and graduate, and the split between graduates whose degrees pay off and those whose don’t. It would help if we could do so with figures that are vaguely accurate to hand.