The universities where 99% haven’t repaid their student loan

Under the headline “The universities where 99% haven’t repaid their student loan”, it has used the Freedom of Information Act to get data on the number of borrowers from England and the EU in the 131 that appear in its league table.

It’s then asked for the number of those borrowers that have paid that loan off in full, and come up with a percentage that applicants, observers and enemies can use in their decision-making, commentary and attacks on Twitter.

After all:

With many students struggling to repay debts, the taxpayer is being left to pick up the spiralling bill.

Oxford and Cambridge are top with 23 per cent each, and LSE, Imperial and Durham are close behind. Languishing at the bottom are UWTSD, UWS, Hartpury, Falmouth and Ulster, hovering around the 1 per cent mark.

Good grief. On one level this “measurement” will pick up the highest earners post-graduation. But it will obviously also be distorted by the rate of expansion since 2006 - Falmouth, for example, had a total UG enrolment of 1975 back in 2006/07, and 5365 in 2021/22.

As such it’s also distorted by the shape of expansion since 2006 when compared with different fee levels. Students weren’t taking out tuition fee loans for £9,250 in 2006 - and they obviously take longer to repay.

The table doesn’t take into account that the tuition fee loan and the maintenance loan are paid off at the same time - and so universities where students are entitled to less maintenance loan have students graduating with lower debts that are faster to clear, graduate outcomes all being equal.

And the calculation fails to take into account that some universities enrol more students who don’t need to take out the tuition fee loan at all - and so again, graduate with lower debts that are faster to clear, graduate outcomes all being equal.

Yes, I know. It also doesn’t take into account the career choices that might stem from the mix of subjects that a university teaches, or the location of the university, or the earnings profile of the entrants’ families and all of the other things that you’d want to control for when comparing “performance” in this way.

The accompanying narrative chooses the “graduate premium” frame - and doesn’t reflect at all on the inequality of it all. Do we really want a society where the supposedly “most academically able” all earn vastly more than others? I don’t.

But the pernicious part is the debt framing. £9k fees were never supposed to be paid back in full. The idea was always a roughly 50:50 split between taxpayer and graduate, with the most successful paying more (sometimes more than 50 per cent) over their lifetime to cover those who were less economically successful.

If the last ten years has taught us anything, it’s that the most successful in society really resent subsidising others’ education. So article after article plays to the gallery, and bangs on about the tax/debt hybrid as a debt alone - one that many don’t (shock horror) don’t repay in full. And over time, the idea of any subsidy has come to be seen with horror.

That’s what has led to the changes in recent years - lower repayment thresholds, lower interest rates and a 10 year extension to the cut off - that now sees average graduates over their lifetimes on average paying much more for much less, while the richest grads pay much less.

The very richest in society pay upfront, of course - where £9,250 is a steal if your mum and dad have been paying £20,480 a year for in private school fees (Schoolfeeschecker, average cost per child).

But so skewed is the public’s perception that the hybrid is really just a debt, coupled with the recovery changes introduced since 2022, that reverting the system to more of a hybrid - where fees are lower, interest rates are higher (which tends only to impact men in their late 50s and 60s) and the rest is paid for through progressive general taxation, that any hopes that Bridget Phillipson might have had of flattening the curve are getting harder and harder to pull off - because neither Sunday Times readers nor Rachel Reeves will stand for it.