I owe £84,000 in university fees – and that’s before they go up…

Think back to the simpler times of 2018: Avengers: Infinite War was released. We had the #Me, too movement. The internet was born “Big Chungus”. There was one royal weddingwhich made everyone happy forever.

In addition to these major events, I was putting up lights a room that looked quite like a prison cell and learning that everything can be messed up if you just believe. That means I went to college.

Four and a half years later and two degrees lower, I dropped out of college. Nine months later, in September 2022, my student debt was £72,800. By November 2023 it had grown to £76,100. In June this year I owed £81,500. This week, Keir Starmer decided to get up tuition fees by 3 per cent, and I now have just over £84,000 of it student debt.

That’s £12,000 in interest over three years, none of which I spent on a seminar room or a slightly falling apart student union. And the best part is: it just keeps going up.

For a fun, not at all harrowing exercise, I decided to calculate the daily cost of my college degrees, based on what I owe now. If you take four years with 39 weeks of teaching each, the gold figure works out to £538 per week. That is €108 per day. And that is €108 per day now – but that will increase exponentially until I’m 53. By then the interest charged will have blown my total debt to a whopping £217,250.

Can you hear that sound? It is the sound of students in Scotland, Germany, Norway, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, France, Finland and Austria laughing at us. It’s embarrassing.

As college tuition costs and student loan interest continue to rise, the likelihood that future generations will ever pay off their debt is even less likely than before. At my office we play a fun game where we compare our debts; one of my colleagues cheerfully announced that they only owed £69,000. Hurrah! I suspect that the government knows exactly what we, the less educated, have always known; payback period never going to happen. So why continue the charade?

I would like to know what the huge amount that students pay for is higher education actually goes. My four years in college were that stressful. I had a great time, but I could see the courses being underfunded, courses being lost and modules being cancelled.

Every year saw teacher strikeswhich meant I was sometimes paying over £100 a day to learn nothing. My master’s degree was delayed by six months and by then I had signed a lease on a house; so before starting the course I took a very miserable job at a tech company, which only exacerbated my stress.

Even now that I have left university, the problems in higher education persist. Teacher strikes are still ongoing and numbers are being cut; and there is a major problem with student housing RAAC concretely, meaning that more students will have to move off campus and into private housing.

Last month, President Biden canceled $4.5 billion student debt. America is a country that likes to create moneyso this was quite something. Has Socialist Starmer followed suit? Of course not. For a politician who values ​​social mobility, he seems intent on keeping millions of people from studying for useful jobs for fear of living in debt for decades.

My student loan has become a constant companion – and in a way, its presence is almost a comfort. I watch it grow, like a child, or with a horrible sense of fear. Perhaps when my guilt finally disappears in 2052, I will experience a sense of loss. Maybe I’ll organize a funeral for it, which would cost about the equivalent of seven months of college tuition. Bargain.