We’ve discussed the inadequacy of the loan amount, the weird reasons that might be causing the government to not increase those amounts, and the sustained fall in numbers participating.

We’ve not talked so much about what’s about to happen to PG graduates.

When postgraduate loans were introduced by the Westminster government in 2015, the median salary for a 21-30 year old holding a PG qualification was £28,000.

Meanwhile someone on the minimum wage working 40 hours a week was earning £13,936.

Put another way, the 6 per cent repayment rate for PG loans over the threshold amounted to £420 a year on the median (young) salary – paid, of course, on top of undergraduate loan repayments of £630, so £1050 in total.

If you were on the minimum wage, you weren’t paying back anything.

So when then universities minister Jo Johnson announced that the repayment threshold for those loans was to be £21,000, most people said “fair enough” – there’s a decent distance from the minimum wage, and chances are that plenty of PGs will soon end up earning much more.

The little sting in the tail was that that threshold was to remain frozen for five years – and then “regularly reviewed”.

So scroll forward those five years to 2020, and things looked a little less generous. The median salary for a 21-30 year old holding a PG qualification by then was £31,000 and the minimum wage £17,004 – still, arguably, in the realms of OK.

By then the 6 per cent repayment rate for PG loans over the threshold amounted to £600 a year on the median (young) salary – but that was compensated somewhat by Theresa May’s “British Dream” increase to the UG threshold, so undergraduate loan repayments for the £31k grad were £398, and so £998 in total.

If you were on the minimum wage, you still weren’t paying anything.

You know what happened next, at least in the macro economy.

In 2020 the fabled “review” resulted in a quiet announcement (with no justification attached) that the £21k threshold would be frozen until April 2022. In 2022 another review with no justification attached resulted in an announcement that the £21k threshold would be frozen again until April 2023. In 2023 it happened again – another quiet announcement with no justification attached that the £21k threshold would be frozen yet again until April 2024.

(One of the classic Sir Humphrey aspects of these decisions is that when the “policy” doesn’t change, we never get an Equality Impact Assessment on the decision, despite there being obvious impacts on…equality arising from a freeze.)

If you were a graduate wanting to know how much will be dedicated from your salary in about 5 weeks time, you may well find yourself on this SLC webpage, which sets out revised repayment thresholds published last August.

It says there that the income thresholds for repayment of Postgraduate Masters and Doctoral Loans to apply from April 2024 will be “announced in due course”.

And then if you search a little harder, you’ll find that on 14th November of last year, the Department for Education (DfE) and Welsh Government confirmed the Postgraduate Income Contingent Student Loans repayment threshold to apply from 6 April 2025.

And guess what? It’s gonna be… £21,000. With no justification attached.

The upshots are significant. The median (young) graduate salary is now £35,000 and the minimum wage will be £25,397 as of April 1st (40 hours pw).

So the 6 per cent repayment rate for PG loans over the threshold will amount to £840 a year on the median (young) salary – and the undergraduate loan repayments at 9 per cent over the new £28,470 threshold will be £588 – or £1,428 a year.

When you add on the commercial debt that PG students are now more likely to be taking out (largely, we can assume, because the loan covers less and less of the total costs of PG study), that’s quite the increase.

But the real stinger is those PG grads on the minimum wage. As of April 1st, they’ll be repaying both PG and UG loans immediately for the first time – £264 and £36, or £300 in total – again, on top of any commercial debt they’ve taken out.

We don’t even have figures for commercial debt and PGs – DfE’s sporadic Student Income and Expenditure Survey doesn’t bother researching PGs.

All of these threshold problems – the fixed parental income threshold that is reducing UG entitlement to maintenance loans every year, the fixed Plan 3 repayment threshold, and the 40-year term/25k UG repayment threshold – they’re all helping to pay for richer graduates (as of entry in 2023) being set to pay much less over their lifetime now that their UG interest will be RPI rather than RPI+3%.

The richest graduates (those that don’t pay in full up front, that is) will pay back in full and yet that won’t even cover the cost of making that loan from the Treasury.

The system is now a reverse-Robin Hood – literally robbing the poor to soak the future-rich. Doesn’t seem fair, really.