LogFAQs > #979485709

Lobinde posted...

At least in the US student debt reduction/forgiveness has actually become a discussion on the table. In the UK, even if you suggested 1 of student loan forgiveness you'd be immediately shouted at and laughed out of the room.

I don't know if you would get laughed out of the room, but student loans are handled differently here in the UK.

It looks like new students aren't required to pay anything back until they're earning 25k (for reference, I think the median full-time salary in the UK was around 30k last time I looked into it). You pay 9% of your income about this threshold towards your loans, and anything unpaid is written off after 40 years. I'm not saying that this will have no impact on a student going to university now, but if they earned 30k/year they could pay 450 a year (38/month) for 40 years (18k in total, which is less than you'd borrow for tuition fees alone), and the remainder would be written off.

It's nowhere near the sort of hardship that people can fall into by taking out student loans in the US.

And just a note that we have loan forgiveness in place. It ranges from 25 - 40 years, depending on when you took out your loans, but I believe that the majority of people don't pay back their loans before they are written off. We do have it pretty good here, compared to the US.