This is how the Conservative Government values students – as debt slaves
![The government backtracked on its promise to raise the repayments threshold from £21,000, according to the petition [Image: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian].](https://voxpoliticalonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/160617-students.png)
The government backtracked on its promise to raise the repayments threshold from £21,000, according to the petition [Image: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian].
It focuses on the system remaining “affordable to the taxpayer” while students can still access a university education, regardless of their ability to repay loans.
That’s all very well, but freezing the earnings threshold at which students start to repay their debt means payments will become due earlier in their working career, at times when they are less able to afford them, due to inflation.
It’s a clear message that people should not consider a university career if they don’t have a clear plan to pay back the debts they accrue – or aren’t already independently wealthy.
Otherwise a college degree could become a one-way ticket to a life of debt – exactly the opposite of its original purpose.
A petition opposing a retrospective rise in the cost of student loans that obtained 120,000 signatures in just a few days has been rejected by the government.
Campaigner Alex True, who began the petition while doing his finals at Durham University, said he was “disappointed and disheartened” at the government’s response.
The petition focused on a promise made in 2010 that from April 2017 the student loans repayment threshold of £21,000 would be upped each year with average earnings.
It argued that “the government has now backtracked on this promise, freezing the threshold at £21,000. Graduates will now pay more on their student loans”.
But the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said in a statement posted on the petition site: “Freezing the repayment threshold ensures that the student support system remains affordable to the taxpayer and all students can access a university education, irrespective of their ability to pay.”
Source: Government throws out student loans petition | Money | The Guardian
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A government should help and serve the nation with there interests and coconcerns equally matched no matter of status, colour or creed.
Unfortunately with the Tories this never happens unless you come from the wealthiest side of life. ?
This is just a start on the Tory path to ensuring that only they and their wealthy chums can afford higher education. They detest the idea of working class people having access to higher education, just as they detest the NHS and any public service. At the same time they are taking away our Public Libraries, which means people will find it much harder to educate themselves.
Sounds like the Department of Business Innovation and Skills needs to go back to the very basics of why it was created and not speaking from the wrong oriface where the sun does not shine. Pretty obvious this organisation has become a Cons puppet ensuring that the Cons policy of only the rich, home grown and overseas, get a decent education and get on in the world. We really have lost our way to political madness.
All post-war British governments have used DEBT to shackle the electorate. Originally they used Mortgages and ever higher house prices but housing is now far too expensive so they had to come up with a new system and they came up with a system whereby the number of Students increased from 5% to 50% and still rising.They persuaded young people that they MUST get a Degree ,regardless of the subject,and in the process get fitted up with a shiny big Student Loan for a basic minimum of well over £60K.As well as getting fitted up with a nice big loan they also get 3 years of EU Indoctrination that persuades them that Open Borders and mass immigration is a good thing,which it IS if you want to drive down wages to Third World levels.
We now have Students with IQ’s as low as 100 points which is the British Average,by what leap of the imagination is the AVERAGE person able to study at the most advanced level,unless you construct a range of phoney degrees with abysmally low standards covering “subjects” such as “Media Studies” which by some strange coincidence is exactly what we have done!