Hasn’t the recession taught us anything about the dangers of debt?  writes Charlie Cashdan.

Well, with an increase in university tuition fees on the way, a whole new generation will have no chance to avoid being saddled with thousands of pounds worth of it!

The Government is preparing a review of university tuition fees and a report out today states that the majority of universities want the yearly fees raised to an average of £6,500 a year and suggests that a minimum of £5000 is fair and feasible.

One university even suggested raising it to £20,000 a year!

£5000 over a three year course means that the student will start their working life with at least £15,000 of debt plus anything extra they have had to borrow for living costs.

How will they ever be able to afford a house?  How can they start saving towards a pension or building up savings for the future with all that being taken out of their wage each month?

Gone are the days when going to university guaranteed you a top job, loads of graduates land up working in call centres, retail or temping so these debts are crippling.  Being able to defer repayments until you earn a certain amount is of no use when interest is just piled on for every month you don’t pay.

There was a girl on the news this morning that had done six years of medical school and had £30,000 of debt.  She was only earning £22,000 a year now that she was a doctor and said it would take at least twenty years to clear her debts as long as she kept working continually (so what if she has a child?  No option to give up work then as The Children’s Society suggested a woman should in their recent study – see previous blog)

My step sons work terribly hard at excellent schools and are being primed to go to top universities already, even at 11 and 14.  They talk about it all the time and the 14-year -old has been told by his teachers Oxbridge is a real possibility.  He wants to be a surgeon and the youngest a vet.  Both courses are six years long.  At £5000 a year, they will both graduate with a minimum combined debt of £60,000.

This is horrendous!  And how on earth will they pay rent in places like Oxford and Cambridge without borrowing even more money?  They want a gap year as well!  A part time job in the student bar and a summer job won’t cover all that lot, surely?

There were no fees when I went to university.  I had been brought up the old fashioned way to fear debt with a passion and to ‘cut your cloth’ as my father always said.

I chose a local university so that I could live at home to save costs and certainly would not have gone if fees had been in existence.  In the end, I had to borrow a relatively small amount to pay for my computer to be upgraded and to keep my car on the road as I couldn’t get to the campus from our village without it.

I worried so much about that debt, as did my parents, that I saved like crazy and paid it off a year after graduating.  If I had borrowed to pay tuition fees as well, I might still be paying it off now ten years later!

Higher fees will mean more people have to stay at home and go to the local university but with so much prejudice about the standards of different institutions, particularly the modern universities converted from polytechnics, this makes things very unfair and a bit of a postcode lottery.

What if ‘better’ universities start to charge even higher fees?  We’ll have a two-tier higher education system just like we have now with comprehensives and grammar schools.

This will surely prevent many gifted and capable students from going to university and foster a carefree attitude about dept in those that do.  Gosh, if you’re £30,000 in debt already, what’s another £2000 on your credit card going to matter?

Agree with Charlie? Post your comments below.