On February 11, several hundred graduates and current students gathered outside parliament to protest changes to the student loan repayment system that will further lock young people into long-term debt. Organised by the NUS alongside local student unions, graduate groups, Save the Student and other networks, the demonstration saw some wearing shark costumes and holding placards accusing the government of behaving like "loan sharks".

Graduates have taken to social media and other public spaces to describe their reality of loan balances that barely move despite years of repayments, and in some cases grow as interest accumulates. They point to their experience of juggling multiple part-time jobs to cover rent and basic living costs, working unpaid or precarious internships, and cutting back on essentials so monthly repayments can be met. For students and graduates this is not an abstract policy debate but the lived experience of the incoherence of the whole system.

The immediate trigger was a decision in the Autumn 2025 Budget to freeze the Plan 2 repayment threshold at the April 2026 level (£29,385) for three years from April 2027. Under Plan 2, graduates pay 9% of earnings above that threshold. Freezing the threshold means that as wages rise with inflation or pay growth, more of a graduate's income falls into the repayment band. In practice, many people will start repaying earlier after graduating and remain paying for longer, increasing lifetime repayments potentially by thousands for those on typical incomes. NUS has warned that the freeze will add "hundreds of pounds" to annual repayments for many Plan 2 holders [1].

Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that the freeze will particularly affect graduates on middle incomes. Those who earn too much to have their loans written off quickly, but not enough to repay the full balance early, are expected to see lifetime repayments rise by several thousand pounds. Higher earners are less affected, as they typically repay their loans in full regardless of threshold changes [2].

Graduates have been burdened with an unpredictable and opaque system. They are particularly angered by the arbitrary and imposed nature of the recent changes, given that the terms they signed up to have been altered after the fact. This arbitrariness is not incidental: it is part of the concentration of power in a small executive able to reshuffle financial rules at will.

The policy is part of the broader framing of higher education as an individual transaction, creating a capital-centred system where students are made a target because education is thought of as something which students engage in for self-serving reasons, while at the same time are penalised not only financially but having to devote time to making ends meet, needing to work during study in insecure part-time jobs. Students are treated not as members of a society whose production and reproduction depends on education, but as fragmented consumers.

Responding to comments made by Chancellor Rachel Reeves defending the student loan system and threshold changes, NUS Vice President for Higher Education Alex Stanley said [3]:

"The student loan system isn't working for anyone. Not for students who are having to access foodbanks. Not for graduates who are paying back hundreds of pounds a month without touching the sides of the interest on their loans. And not for the Government as student debt is ballooning. Surely Reeves should be looking for a solution rather than doubling down on a broken system?

Students demonstrating, Gateshead, 2008

"Firstly, the Chancellor needs to stop playing politics with students and graduates. In the Autumn budget she effectively added hundreds of pounds to the amount Plan 2 loan holders pay back each year by freezing the thresholds from 2027. We went to university, signed a complex contractual agreement with the Student Loans Company, and now that loan is a political football impacting our bank balances each month.

"Students and graduates are gearing up to be a powerful electoral force. And with the polling in YouGov which finds there is growing support for measures including completely wiping off all student debt, it is time the Chancellor started looking at the practical solutions which would deliver for student and graduates.

"Anyone who went to University for free should not be able to call the current system fair."

Aside from the spurious economic logic that poses higher education as a cost and not something that is creating value in the economy - value that is used by but unrealised by the businesses that employ its end product, the graduates themselves - the issue throws into relief the way decisions affecting large sections of the population are made, and asks: who decides? The freezing of the repayment threshold is an example of an increasingly arbitrary form of governance, which destroys all the accepted arrangements as it suits those in power. From this perspective, the protests, social-media testimony and union campaigns are not merely pleas for better terms; they are aimed at political agency, challenging the authority as it exists. Demonstrators are speaking and acting in their own name, highlighting the gap between the authority and its institutions, and the lived economic realities of graduate workers. Resistance is not limited as opposition to this specific policy, but is part of the struggle to assert direct influence over decisions that shape their lives.

Notes
1. Plan 2 itself sits within a broader history of student finance reform stretching back to the Dearing Report of the late 1990s and the 2010 Browne Review. Those policy shifts reframed higher education funding around fees and income-contingent loans, normalising the idea that graduates carry the bill. Changes since then - variable fees, marketisation of universities, and new repayment plans - have layered complexity and cohort differences onto the system, while generally increasing costs to the individual massively. The mechanics of Plan 2 mean repayments depend on income rather than outstanding balances, while interest accrues at rates tied to inflation. For numerous borrowers, monthly payments fail even to cover interest, so balances can grow despite decades of payments. By the late 2010s official forecasts (OBR) indicated a large share of post-2012 loans would be unlikely to be fully repaid and therefore expected to be written off, such was the state of the crisis at that time. Th e newest regime, Plan 5, applies to students who started courses from autumn 2023. Plan 5 lowers the repayment threshold, changes interest and repayment rules, and extends the repayment/ write-off period to 40 years. The current protest, however, centres on Plan 2 borrowers (those who began courses between 2012 and 2023 - i.e., starters before the Plan 5 regime introduced in autumn 2023), who face the immediate impact of the threshold freeze.
2. Kate Ogden, "How do Plan 2 student loans work, and how have they changed over time?", Institute for Fiscal Studies, February 6, 2026
https://ifs.org.uk/articles/how-do-plan-2-student-loans-work-and-how-have-they-changed-over-time
3. "Stop the Plan 2 repayment threshold freeze; response to Rachel Reeves' comments", NUS, February 4, 2026
https://www.nus.org.uk/stop-plan-2-repayment-threshold-freeze "Stop the Plan 2 repayment threshold freeze"

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