Are graduates getting a raw deal? With Jim Dickinson

I'm Connor Knacken, Senior Researcher at the Intergenerational Foundation. We're a research charity fighting for a fairer deal for younger and future generations in the UK. We work on some of the big policy challenges shaping the lives of young people, from housing and student finance to taxation, the labour market and the environment. Our work focuses on exposing intergenerational unfairness and proposing practical evidence-based reforms. In this new podcast series, we'll be speaking to some of the UK's leading experts on the issues that matter most to younger and future generations. My guest today is Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonky, where he's written for many years extensively on higher education, student finance, maintenance support, and university governance. And so here at IF, student finance is one of the issues that we've probably spent the most time researching and campaigning on. So this is a topic that we care a great deal about. Jim, thank you very much for joining us.

Pleasure.

So as I said, you've spent years writing about universities and how higher education policy works in practice. So I thought to start us off, it'd be good to ask you how you first came to the issue and what interests you about it.

So, I mean, when I go home at Christmas, my mum says, have you got a proper job yet? And the answer is always no. So when I was a student, I became a student representative. And then I worked for NUS in various roles and went on to be chief exec of a student union. And now I work for a higher education policy organisation called Wonky, as you say. where our job is to obsess about bands and then be that mate of yours that is really obsessed with a particular band and can't understand why you're not quite as obsessed with the band. So I've always been interested in adjacent to the student finance question and now sort of my job is to really get close to what's going on and why it's going on and trying to get underneath the skin of the kind of headlines that you will see in the media.

That's great. So I think speaking of student finance, it's probably good at the outset to do somewhat of an explainer because things can get very complicated very quickly. So I suppose, could you give us a bit of a sense of how student loans work now in England and what are the kind of different plans you sometimes hear about in some of the media debate?

I mean, as you say, there are multiple plans, but broadly they all share a set of features. So on the one hand, it's a loan. You borrow some money that is then either spent on you for your maintenance costs. or is given in the kind of form of a voucher to the university or higher education provider that you've chosen and that has chosen to admit you. So that is what I would call the principle. This is the amount of money that we sort of loan to people. But there's then a series of features that make it a bit less like a loan. So one of the features is it gets written off after a certain amount of time. And one of the big undergraduate plan over the past 10 years, the plan two loans were written off after 30 years. Now, new people who borrow this year, that gets written off after 40 years. And