Student finance: student loans aren’t broken – they protect inherited advantage

This blog was kindly authored by Hannah Rolley, Head of Access at Trinity College Oxford.

We are told, endlessly, that student finance is a problem of scale: the size of the loan, the length of repayments, the psychological weight of ‘lifetime debt’. Graduates are warned to expect forty years of deductions, balances that never quite fall, interest quietly compounding in the background.

But student finance isn’t broken. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect inherited advantage while shifting risk onto those with the least.

There is a profound difference between students who must borrow the maximum available and those whose parents can afford to pay the full cost of university outright: tuition fees, accommodation, living expenses, the lot. No debt. No repayments. No interest. No forty-year shadow.

For years, I wondered whose parents were wealthy enough to do this. Then I remembered the cost of private education. In 2026, it is cheaper to fund a UK home student through three-years at the University of Oxford (fees of £29,379) than it is to send a child to Eton, Radley or Westminster for just one year as a boarder. For families who have already paid over £60,000 a year for secondary school, university fees are not a hardship, they are a staggering 84 per cent discount.

The system works precisely as intended. Tuition fees do not come close to covering the true cost of a degree. This is certainly true at Oxford and other Russell Group universities, where students from the most advantaged backgrounds remain disproportionately over-represented. These students graduate with a world-class education at a fraction of its real cost and then pay nothing further once they enter their high-earning careers.

Meanwhile, students from less wealthy backgrounds borrow the maximum, accrue interest from the moment they enrol, and repay for decades. Two students sit in the same lectures, receive the same degree, and leave with radically different futures – not because of talent or effort, but because of parental wealth. And for some, the barrier comes even earlier: the system quietly excludes those whose faith forbids interest-bearing loans and deters working-class students for whom the prospect of decades of debt is enough to rule university out altogether.

This is not meritocracy. It is inheritance, laundered through policy.

I agree that the psychological impact of graduating with huge ‘debt’, where students see their balance grow year on year despite making monthly payments creates a stifling sense of being trapped. Those whose faith means they have to self-fund rather than borrow, end up putting themselves and or their families through years of hardship – or see attending university as impossible to even contemplate.

I am realistic enough to know that the argument for free university education no longer wins political traction, even though I believe, deeply, that education should never have been commodified in the first place. I was among the first students to take out a loan to pay my tuition fees, and every postgraduate qualification since has required further borrowing. I continue to make repayments today.

But if we are going to insist that degrees must be paid for, then everyone who benefits from them must contribute. That is why I agree that we need a graduate tax. Not as a punishment. Not as an ideological crusade. But as a basic correction of an indefensible imbalance. A graduate tax would ensure that contributions are based on outcomes, not upfront privilege. It would finally lift the burden of loans accruing interest and capture those who currently glide through the system debt-free and go on to lucrative careers without ever paying back into the education that enabled them. It would finally acknowledge that the real subsidy in higher education flows upward toward those who need it least.

The current system asks the least advantaged to shoulder the greatest risk, while the most advantaged are insulated entirely. That is not accidental. It is a political choice. And it is one we should no longer accept.

If we truly believe that higher education has economic, social, and civic value then that value must be shared. Not deferred onto the backs of those with the fewest options but reclaimed from those who have benefited most.

Until we are willing to say that out loud, student finance reform will remain a distraction. The problem is not just the loan. The problem is who never has to take one and why.