University Grants Have Been Scrapped

You know when you wake up and think to yourself, 'Is this, or is this not, going to be a very Tory day?' Oh, you don't bother any more because this is 2016 and every day is a disastrously Tory day? Yeah, same.

So far this year we've had uni fees rising again, the scrapping of the Department of Climate Change, the continuation of the housing crisis and, of course, Brexit – which obviously had cross-party support, but, you know, felt very Tory in its shunting of young people. Today, there's another one: in one of the most drastic middle fingers to working class young people in years, students starting university courses in England will no longer be able to apply for grants towards living costs.

From today, those grants have been replaced by more loans. Previously, students from families with annual incomes of £25,000 or less received a full grant of £3,387, which went a long way towards covering living costs. That's now gone.

The NUS has said the move, introduced by then-chancellor George Osborne in his July 2015 budget, is "disgraceful" and means poorer students will be saddled with a lifetime of debt. NUS vice-president Sorana Vieru told BBC Breakfast: "It could put off students from underprivileged backgrounds from applying, who might not understand how the loan system works, or are very debt-averse. We also know that mature students are way more debt-averse than younger students and that BME [black and minority ethnic] students perceive student debt on a par with commercial debt."

When Osborne announced the measure he said there was a "basic unfairness in asking taxpayers to fund grants for people who are likely to earn a lot more than them". Problem is, even if you decide to jump headfirst into this bottomless debt, we now know that any potential extra earnings you would have made by having a degree are completely eaten up by the loans and interest you have to pay back afterwards.

Working class millennials are getting left behind and this is a nail in the coffin.

@hannahrosewens

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