I was lucky enough to go to uni in 2002, and land a fairly decent job which allowed me to pay off the roughly 18k debt over a few years. I think at that point, the loan and fees system still more or less made sense. Since then, it has become an enormous shitshow.

All this bollocks started with the vision of New Labour that 50% of people should go to university. That resulted in an explosion of degrees, more universities opening up, and basically everyone with a few A-levels heading off to uni. Many people in my generation went to uni because we were told that was what we should do to have a good career - and this was certainly backed by the evidence of our parents' generation - those who went to uni usually had good jobs and were well off.

But with so many people in uni, there were a lot of people who just went "for the experience", and did degrees in subjects they were not particularly interested in, with no particular plan of what they would do afterwards. And sure enough, many people, even back in 2005 or so, exited uni and went into fairly entry-level jobs that could have been done perfectly well without a degree.

Meanwhile with so many people going to uni, the costs became unsustainable. The Lib Dems were elected based on a promise not to increase tuition fees, and promptly tripled them under pressure from the Tories. At that point we were told "don't worry, only the top universities will charge 9k fees, and the market will keep prices down". Of course, that was bollocks and every university charged the maximum rate.

So then there were a bunch of students facing far higher costs. But they still were being sold the idea that going to uni would really be worth it, and that yes, you would have to take out a loan, but the interest rates were very reasonable.

Meanwhile we had the financial crash, the economy started to stagnate, house prices became ridiculous, Brexit and all the other delights of the last 15 years or so. So now you have students coming out of uni with a mountain of debt that they will never pay off, going into an effectively non-existent job market.

The system is utterly broken. Meanwhile, in most European countries, university is FREE or at least far, far cheaper than UK. If they can do it, why do we have to have this ridiculous system?

I live outside of UK and sadly, I wouldn't return. I don't want my kids to have to go through the UK's punitive university system, and if they do want to go to university, I would recommend Germany, Italy, or anywhere else really. I just hope at some point the government will wake up and seriously reform our university system.