And how do we thank young people after Covid? By making student loans even harder to repay

We have asked an enormous amount of young people recently. These changes to student loan repayments are a nasty little kick in the teeth

To say being a teenager in the last few years hasn’t been much fun would be a huge understatement. As a society, we have asked an enormous amount of young people throughout Covid – especially since few have faced any sort of medical jeopardy themselves.

Students arriving on campus next September will do so having had a great big chunk of their youth stolen from them by coronavirus. Teenage parties will have been missed, education erased and so too any number of adolescent life experiences that are so important when moving into early adulthood.

Many will also have experienced mental health issues as a consequence. Focus groups I ran with parents of teenagers in the middle of the second national lockdown were some of the bleakest evenings I have ever spent, as they talked about the toll being taken on their children.

And how do we choose to repay these young people as many of them, blinking into a post-Covid world, head to university? With changes to tuition fees that will see them ordered to repay them when they are earning less and for longer into their working lives; that’s how.

The sixth formers who have just finished filling in their Ucas form can now expect to start paying back their loans once they earn £25,000 rather than the current £27,000 threshold. And they can expect to pay it back for much longer than the current 30 years duration, too.

Ministers justify these changes by saying that the public finances – especially in the aftermath of the pandemic – simply cannot cope with so much student debt left unpaid (a figure that currently stands at around 80 per cent).

To be fair, ministers have attempted to mitigate the impact of these decisions by reducing the interest rates that will be charged to new students over the lifetime of that debt. Graduates might be making repayments earlier, and for longer, but at least that debt won’t be increasing, they say.

Nonetheless, it is hard not to see these reforms as a nasty little kick issued by middle-aged politicians in the direction of those who have sacrificed so much to protect the old from Covid. Especially when taken in parallel with the imminent hikes to national insurance being introduced to pay for adult social care.

There is, however, a counterpoint to this argument. Focus group research that I have been involved with in the last year suggests that it is not, in fact, tuition fee debt that most worries today’s teenagers about the prospect of going to university.

What worries them most is the cost of living when they are actually there. Rent, groceries, textbooks, and, yes, the price of a few cans in the local off licence, are in danger of appearing prohibitively expensive for many, especially from the poorest homes. This is a worry that is only likely to turn into full-blown panic as the cost of living crisis takes off in the coming months.

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The arrangements for the repayment of tuition fees – good or bad – will not make any difference to the costs of undergraduate life. But the reintroduction of a means-tested maintenance grant system really would.

This is not a pie in the sky idea. Maintenance grants were abolished by George Osborne as recently as 2015, when it was said that the Treasury simply couldn’t afford the £1.57bn price tag. Contrasted with the billions that have spent over the life-cycle of coronavirus, that would surely be just a drop in the ocean.

And universities agree. The ever-moderate – and sensible – Universities UK trade association has long made this case, arguing that this would be a far more important intervention than other student finance reforms. It’s Labour party policy too.

What better way to say thank you to many of the young people who gave up so much of their lives to lockdown than helping them pay their way through university? It’s very the least we could do.

Ed Dorrell is a director at Public First