Student fees set to rise but at what cost to graduates’ mental health? New research

After months of discussion and speculation about how British universities will fill budget deficits, the UK government confirmed that tuition fees will be increasing to £9,535 a year in England in 2025. The impact of this price rise on graduates’ mental health in the years to come should not be underestimated, as new research my colleagues and I conducted shows.

The Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government increased tuition fees for English and Welsh undergraduate students starting university from 2012 onwards from around £3,500 a year to around £9,000 a year. In 2015, research my colleagues and I published compared the mental health of those who started university the year before or after this fee increase.

We found only a small effect on mental health, with those paying the higher fees having worse mental health than those paying lower fees at only one of four time points. We concluded that the tuition fee increase had little immediate effect on the mental health of students at the time.

But what about graduates? We were looking at students in their first year at university. During this time, I would like to think that most students are getting stuck into their studies and the social aspects of university, and not worrying too much about student loan debts which are yet to build up, let alone repaid. So, we wondered, might the effect of this fee increase be found later on in life, given that when fees increased in 2012 it was predicted that most graduates would never fully repay their student loan.

You might not worry about your student loan when you are a fresher, but what about when you are working, repaying (or not) your loan as an additional tax every month, and considering whether you can afford to buy a house, get married or start a family? Then the student loan might really start to affect your mental health. So we sought to test this in a new study.

We asked 327 British graduates who had started in the years before or after the 2012 fee increase to complete measures of current mental health. The participants were on average 30 years old and graduated on average nine years ago.

Those who had paid higher tuition fees had more severe symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress than those who had paid lower tuition fees. They also had more severe suicidal thoughts. This difference appeared to be due to those paying higher fees nine years ago struggling more with finances day to day at age 30.

If you have unsecured debt such as credit cards, you are more than three times as likely to have a mental health problem. The UK parliament released a research briefing specifically about the link between consumer debt and mental health in October.

Not like other debt

But student loans are not like other debt. With other debt you can go bankrupt: not with tuition fees, which are pretty much impossible to have wiped. They are taken out of your payslip only above a certain income threshold. They are also subject to compound interest, which has been incredibly high in recent years.

Though interest rates were fixed at 6.3% in 2022, this still has increased the size of student debts considerably. Data released earlier this year from the student loan company showed that most graduates, nearly 1.8 million people, owe more than £50,000 in student debt, with some people having debts over £200,000.

In our sample paying £9,000 a year fees, nine years after graduation only 14% had paid off or reduced the size of their loan, 20% had not repaid anything, and the rest were making payments but the size was either increasing or staying the same. So at the age of 30, the vast majority had the same or worse levels of debt.

The latest fee increase will lead to even higher student loan debt levels, and most graduates (millions of people) will be trapped with these repayments for the full maximum of 30 years. Will this fee increase affect students’ mental health immediately? The research suggests not right away, but the further we increase tuition fees the more likely it appears we will harm the mental health of graduates for decades to come.

Thomas Richardson has been paid as a consultant and receives royalties from Silvercloud health for developing an intervention around financial difficulties and mental health. He also owns shares and acts as an advisor for TellJo which identifies customers who are financially vulnerable due to factors including mental health problems.