I started my undergraduate degree in 2012 – the first cohort to pay £9,000 a year in tuition fees. Now, over a decade later, I’m watching the university system that shaped me fall apart.
The year everything changed
In September 2012, I walked through the doors of the University of Lincoln as a wide-eyed undergraduate, blissfully unaware that I was part of a national experiment. My cohort was the first to be charged the new £9,000 Plan 2 annual tuition fee – tripled overnight from £3,000. We were also, as it turned out, the last year that grades really mattered for getting in.
Let me be clear about something before I go any further: going to the University of Lincoln was the best decision I ever made. The tutors were exceptional. The university shaped me in ways I couldn’t have predicted, and I wouldn’t be the person I am today without it. What I’m about to describe is not a criticism of the people who taught me. It’s a criticism of the system that has been slowly strangling them.
The bums-on-seats era
The year after I started, something shifted. University higher-ups realised that every student through the door was now worth £9,000 a year – £27,000 over a three-year degree. The financial incentive to fill seats became irresistible. Entry requirements began to soften. More students were accepted through clearing. The gates opened wider and wider.
Simultaneously, university was being repackaged as the logical next step after sixth form or college. The messaging was relentless: go to uni, get a degree, get a good job. It became less of a choice and more of a conveyor belt. The higher education entry rate among UK 18-year-olds climbed from around 30% in the mid-2010s to a peak of 38% by 2021. Participation among under-30s passed the 50% mark. Nearly half the population was now going to university.
And why wouldn’t they? It was packaged as the most sensible decision.
The expansion bubble
What followed was a building boom. New accommodation blocks. Shiny new facilities. Marketing budgets that would make your eyes water. Universities were competing for students like retailers competing for footfall, because that’s essentially what they’d become – businesses chasing revenue.
The numbers tell the story. Total outstanding student loan debt in England has ballooned from manageable figures to £267 billion as of March 2025. The average graduate now enters repayment carrying roughly £53,000 of debt – making English student loans the largest by international standards, according to the OECD. The government forecasts that total outstanding debt will hit £500 billion by the late 2040s.
And only about a third of Plan 2 borrowers (those of us who started from 2012 onwards) are expected to repay their loans in full before they’re written off after 30 years. The system was designed so that most people would never actually clear their debt. It’s not a loan in any meaningful sense. It’s a graduate stealth tax with compound interest.
(I still can’t quite figure out who seeks to benefit from this system. It can’t be the loan companies, as the loans go unpaid. If you have any idea, please let me know as I’ve been scratching my head over this for years).
My own personal loan nightmare
I can attest to this personally. My Plan 2 undergraduate loan and Plan 3 postgraduate loan carry interest rates of up to 7.3%. Even running a six-figure business and paying off a significant amount every year, I’m still fighting a losing battle. The interest accrues daily and compounds monthly. In many years, the interest added to outstanding loans across the system has been higher than all repayments combined. I’m running on a treadmill that keeps speeding up.
The figures are nightmarish, but I have to remind myself that it’ll all be wiped out after 30 years anyway, so I won’t actually end up paying all of that interest. Many people won’t pay any interest at all.
I did my degree, my master’s, and my PhD with a single goal: to become a lecturer. That was the plan. That was always the plan. But the timing could not have been worse. I was the first year to get charged £9,000 in tuition fees for my undergraduate degree. Fortunately, I got First Class Honours and secured a scholarship for my master’s degree. But then, when I started my PhD, it was a year before the government introduced doctoral loans (which became available from the 2018/19 academic year). So, while students starting just one year after me could access government-backed PhD funding, I had to work four jobs simultaneously to pay for my doctoral studies. One of those jobs was Arcanum Copy, my copywriting business, which I started out of necessity. My PhD didn’t fund itself, and nobody was going to fund it for me.
The classroom reality
By the time I’d progressed to teaching as an associate lecturer, the consequences of mass expansion were impossible to ignore.
I had students in my seminars who had achieved A* grades at A-level sat next to students who had barely scraped through with the minimum entry requirements. These were not students of similar capabilities working at different speeds – they were operating at fundamentally different levels.
This created an impossible teaching problem. Push too hard and you lose the weaker students entirely. Pitch it at the middle and the strongest students coast. I couldn’t challenge the top of the room without abandoning the bottom. The range of ability that mass expansion had produced meant that something had to give, and what gave was the ceiling.
This wasn’t the students’ fault. Nobody told the student with three Ds at A-level that university might not be the right path for them. The system took their money – £9,000 a year – and put them in a seat. The system failed them, not the other way around.
The graduate premium myth
Over the past decade, employers have started to notice. A degree used to be a reliable signal of capability. When 15% of the population had one, it meant something. When nearly 50% do, it means considerably less.
Research from the Intergenerational Foundation found that once you control for prior academic attainment and socioeconomic background, the graduate wage premium drops sharply – to around 11% for young graduates – and it has been declining for two decades. For those with lower degree classifications, the premium is negligible. One analysis suggests that around 160,000 of the UK’s annual student intake of roughly 495,000 will earn about the same as, or less than, non-graduates – but unlike non-graduates, they’ll be saddled with decades of loan repayments.
A third of non-recent graduates are employed in roles that don’t require a degree. Over 6,000 planned graduate roles were scrapped in 2024 alone. The promise of “go to uni, get a good job” has stopped being true for a significant chunk of graduates, and people have started to notice.
The visa shock
Then came the policy changes. In January 2024, the UK government banned most international students on taught postgraduate courses from bringing family dependants with them. The rationale was immigration control, which made sense, as a lot of international students exploited the system as an easy way of moving to the UK. Once the visa was secured, the degree didn’t really matter.
But it did matter for universities, because international students were the financial lifeline. They paid significantly higher fees than home students – often two to three times as much. Universities had become dependent on this income to cross-subsidise both teaching and research. When the tap was turned down, the cracks became chasms.
The great contraction
The numbers now are bleak. Around 45% of English higher education institutions reported a financial deficit in 2024-25, up from about 30% the year before. Sixty-three institutions have reported deficits for three consecutive years. An estimated 10,000 or more university jobs were lost in the 2024-25 academic year alone, with predictions that this could become an annual figure. The list of universities making redundancies reads like a roll call of the sector: Dundee (700 jobs), Birmingham City (342 at risk), Edinburgh (£140 million in cuts), Sheffield, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Hull, Canterbury Christ Church – the list goes on and on.
Programmes are being shuttered. English literature, languages, linguistics, archaeology, performing arts, chemistry departments – entire disciplines are being culled. The universities that expanded most aggressively during the boom are now contracting most painfully.
Publish or perish
By the time I finished my PhD, the world of academia had changed so much that it no longer appealed to me. The Research Excellence Framework – the REF – had created a culture where lecturers were valued primarily for their published research output, not their teaching. If you weren’t constantly publishing, you were expendable. And the publishing wasn’t paid work; it was expected on top of an already full teaching and administrative load.
A RAND study found that the majority of UK researchers perceived the REF as having a negative influence overall. Early career researchers reported cultures of pressure, anxiety, and in some cases bullying, driven by the institutional obsession with research metrics. Good teachers who didn’t publish enough were being pushed out. The REF system particularly punished the humanities, where groundbreaking work often takes years of sustained research to produce – deep, long-term scholarship that doesn’t fit neatly into assessment cycles.
With faculties thinning and workloads increasing for those who remained, the job I’d spent a decade training for had become something I didn’t want. I’d watched talented colleagues burn out, take voluntary redundancy, or simply leave for the private sector. The ones who stayed were stretched thinner every year.
Students are noticing
The current crop of students aren’t stupid. They can see the understaffed departments. They can see the cancelled modules and the lecturers running between three different courses because their colleagues were made redundant. They can also see the shiny buildings that were built during the boom years now sitting half-empty or being sold off.
And they’re asking the question that the whole sector has been dreading: is this actually worth £9,000 a year?
For many, the honest answer is becoming harder to defend.
Where does this leave us?
I don’t regret my university education. Not for a second. Lincoln gave me the tools, the confidence, and the critical thinking skills that underpin everything I do now – running multiple businesses, teaching workshops, building a career on my own terms. The irony is that the skills university gave me are the same skills that helped me see the system for what it’s become.
But I was lucky. I had brilliant tutors. I was pushed. I was challenged. I got in when getting in still meant something, and I was taught by people who hadn’t yet been tested to their limits by mass redundancies and constrained budgets.
The students starting today deserve the same. Whether they’ll get it, given what’s happening to the sector, is a question I genuinely can’t answer.
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