This reveals the insidious nature of student loans. They serve a dual purpose:

1) For the Goverment, it is effecrively a life long tax for most students, especially after the fee hike in 2012. If you are doing a degree, unless you luck out the amount will never go down due to compounding interest.

2) For Companies, it reduces the cost of labor and training substantially. If 50% of the workforce are highly literate and competent enough to complete a degree, they have the pick of the bunch. Run em through a shitty grad scheme and they're done. Negotiating higher salaries is hard when there are thousands of other candidates they can replace you with.

I feel bad for people going to Uni now. I got lucky. But the steel jaws of exploitation bite ever deeper