The list of ways in which my generation has been unlucky is long and well-documented (including in this column): graduating into a post-financial crash jobs market, priced out of the housing market, social safety net stripped away, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. But here are a few small ways in which my peers and I have been lucky.
My school year was the first not to require the BCG vaccine and therefore the first not to bear the upper-arm scar that marks all teenagers of the Nineties. We were also among the first to get the HPV vaccine, so we have significantly lower chance of developing cervical cancer than those who came before us. Mine was the first year to sit our A-levels after the A* grade was introduced (I’m not sure this bit of grade inflation was really a good thing or has made much difference to the course of my life, but it did please overachievers like me).
And we were the last but one school year to go to university on Plan 1 student loans, before fees were hiked to more than £9,000 a year. It matters that we were the penultimate year, rather than the very last, because my peers were free to choose to take a gap year without paying for it handsomely in subsequent fees. I began my undergraduate degree 15 years ago, in 2013, with roughly £25,000 of debt: around £10,000 of which was fees. If I’d been born in 1994, as my brother was, I would have owed something like £40,000, on which I’d be accruing as much as 6.2 per cent interest from the minute I took it out.
I’ve been thinking about this particular bit of luck (though, of course, it would have been luckier still to be born before 1980 and therefore avoid tuition fees altogether) this week, as it was confirmed that tuition fees will now rise with inflation every year from next September. I’d long assumed that I would never manage to pay off my student loan, and that the remainder would be written off after 30 years. To this effect, I had not looked at my balance with the Student Loans Company until this week, when I was surprised and pleased to discover that I have “just” £8,000 left to pay off. At my current rate of repayment, I will be student-loan free in around two years, a mere 17 years after finishing my degree. I am very much looking forward to not paying the so-called graduate tax of 9 per cent of my income over a certain threshold.
By contrast, a friend, R—, who is in her mid twenties, tells me that her loan, which stood at about £41,000 when she graduated five years ago, is now worth £54,000 because of interest. She is paying back around £180 a month – and accruing £195 a month in interest. There is, at this rate, a very real likelihood that she will never repay the loan in full. These figures will be more impossible still for those born eight years after her. I ask if she thinks it was worth it; given her time again, would she still go to university?
“Well, I did meet my boyfriend there…”
“But is he worth £54,000 plus interest?”
“Ummmmmm…” she laughs, and declines to answer.
To be fair to her, neither is an easy question. If I had my time again, would I still go to university? I have to say yes, because I cannot imagine how different my life and career would be now if I had not; I certainly would not have got on to my postgraduate journalism programme. My time at university gave me moderate career prospects and lifelong friendships; it taught me to live independently. But most importantly, it introduced me to two people who lit up my still-malleable brain in ways I never could have imagined: the medieval history professor who introduced me to the study of queenship and taught me that there were women who held political and military power long before many historians recognise; and the Old English professor who silenced babbling theatres by reciting Beowulf from memory and preferred to lecture in bare feet. I cannot say whether R—’s boyfriend was worth all that student debt, but Iona and Alaric were absolutely worth mine.
[Further reading: Danny Kruger’s war on Whitehall]
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This article appears in the 30 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, No More Kings