Higher education fees leave students with psychological burden

The argument

The argument is that the psychological burden of student debt operates independently of what a graduate will actually repay. Under the current system, those earning below the repayment threshold of around £21,000 will not have to pay back their student loan, and defenders of fees treat this as answering the affordability objection. Proponents of free higher education reply that the objection was never only about affordability: simply the thought of such a crushing debt can be problematic, and the figure appears on a statement addressed to the student whether or not it is ever collected. The reason the threshold fails to dispel the anxiety is that it offers a conditional reassurance about an unknown future. A student is told that the debt will not be collected if their earnings stay low, which requires them to be confident about earnings they cannot yet predict, and which frames a modest income as the condition under which the burden disappears. The debt therefore remains a fixed and visible number attached to a life whose shape is not yet settled. The weight of that number is not evenly distributed. For those who have to borrow the entire sum of their fees, and whose parents cannot contribute financially, the debt is at its largest and arrives without any family cushion behind it, so the burden falls most heavily on precisely the students whom widened access was intended to reach. What makes this a case against fees rather than a general observation about worry is the reported consequence. There are frequent reports of students who have said that the quantity of money they owed deepened their mental health issues, which means the harm is not confined to the repayment period but is incurred during study, when the debt is doing nothing except existing. On this account fees impose a cost that the repayment threshold cannot remove.

Context

In recent years there has been a push to improve not only people's physical health, but also their mental health. Increasingly, studies suggest that our financial health can have a big impact on our mental health; as those with the least money report more feelings of anxiety and depression If debt can lead to psychological problems, then fees may not only harm student's opportunities but also their health.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Whilst debt and depression are linked, often depression can lead to an accumulation of debt from poor decision-making [

Rejecting the premises

If premise one is false, in that depression causes debt rather than vice versa, then this could be disproved.