‘We will never escape these debts’: Undergraduate experiences of indebtedness, income-contingent loans and the tuition fee rises

Abstract

This article critically examines how undergraduate students in a red brick university in the North of England have experienced the threefold rise in tuition fees since 2012, with particular attention on how they have begun to understand and negotiate the process of indebtedness. Drawing on a corpus of 118 interviews conducted with a group of 40 undergraduates across their whole student lifecycle, analysis is directed toward examining how students have variously sought to respond to the policy, reconcile the debt with their decision to study at university and, begin to negotiate a life of everyday indebtedness. The findings are located in the context of wider neoliberal policy trends that have continued to emphasise ‘cost-sharing’ as a mechanism for increased investment within the higher education sector generally, and individual fiscal responsibility specifically. Given the lack of any other viable career pathways for both lower and higher income students, they had to accept indebtedness as inevitable and take what comfort they could from the discourses of ‘foregone gain’ that they had been presented with. Evidently, and as the students in our sample well recognised, whether those discourses actually reflect the future remains to be seen. There is also no evidence within our data that students anticipated the subsequent changes to the repayment terms and conditions – a fact that is likely to compound feelings of economic powerlessness and constrain their capacity for financial agency yet further.

Keywords:

• Student debt
• indebtedness
• student experience
• debt attitudes
• higher education

Acknowledgement

The authors are grateful to the University of Sheffield and especially Dr Julian Crockford and the Widening Participation Research and Evaluation Unit, who host the ‘Sheffield Student 2013’ longitudinal tracking project this paper is based on. Special thanks to Catherine McKeown and the Financial Support team for their support and help.

Notes

1. Following further increases in the tuition fee to £9250, and increases in the maintenance loan, this estimate has now risen to £57,000 (Belfield et al. 2017).

2. Maximum amount of maintenance loan for student studying away from home, outside of London for the academic year 2012/2013.

3. When the policy was launched, the minimum repayment threshold was set at £21,000. This figure was originally supposed to rise annually with earnings. However, in 2015 this repayment threshold was frozen until 2021. In September 2017, the Conservative Prime Minister Teresa May announced further plans to raise the threshold to £25,000.

4. The POLAR classification that bands small areas in terms of HE participation was developed by the Higher Education Funding Council for England. All areas of the UK are ranked according to their HE participation and this ranking is then divided into quintiles with the same proportion of young people. Here, we report the ratio for the lowest participation areas, Quintile 1.

5. NRBUs’ fee-waiver scheme was part of the National Scholarship Programme. Providing students with financial assistance in the form of a tuition fee waiver and/or financial assistance, the scheme was designed to support those students who were in the lowest 10% in terms of household income (see Hordósy and Clark forthcoming, for further discussion).