Nearly three-quarters of graduates will not clear their student loans before the end of the repayment period. This means the large majority of those who go to university aged 18 or 19 will still be paying off their loans well into their forties and early fifties. This article summarises a report published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and funded by the Sutton Trust.
The Government’s controversial reforms to higher education funding - involving an increase in the cap on tuition fees to £9,000 per year and the removal of most direct funding for universities - have this month been implemented. However, the new system is substantially more progressive than its predecessor, as the richest graduates are likely to repay ten times as much as the poorest, and would even pay back more than the value of what they borrowed. Here we summarise IFS research assessing who wins and who loses from these reforms.
This paper investigates the financial implications of the higher education funding regime to be introduced in English universities in September 2012. The analysis is based on simulated lifetime earnings profiles among graduates, linked to imputed information on parental incomes and institution and course choices.
