United Kingdom

Also to be clear, this is more like a graduate tax than a loan.

You pay back 9% of whatever your earn over £26k and whatever you owe is written off when you are 50 something. It doesn't count on credit reports etc.

It's not great though as high earners end up paying way less over their life as they pay it off early.

People will blame Nick Cleggs Lib Dems for this and yeah they play a big part in this, but the root cause is further back.

Tony Blair removed the cap on the number of students who could go to university which lead to introducing tuition fees. Before then you used to get a grant, I got three grand a year, to go to university.

Suddenly universities could massively increase the number places so they did. This lead to spiralling costs, which lead to fees going up and loans had to go up to cover this. They also borrowed heavily to expand.

David Cameron removed the cap on fees while increasing the money students could borrow with Cleggs backing (against a key Lib Dem manifesto pledge fucking the Lib Dems for years after) and Universities started getting properly greedy.

Inflation kicked in but the loans available to students didn't because the government couldn't afford to, majority of students never pay back the full amount before its written off. Student loan book is set to be a trillion pounds in about 20 years.

The whole situation is fucked because Blair said anyone could go, rather than being honest about what we could afford to pay for. Now we have a ticking timebomb that someone's going to have to pay.

The lib Dems and Tories decided to fuck over our youth back in the early 2010s

Lib Dems campaigned on a promise of free uni (it had gotten to about £3k a year at the time, up from the less than £1k a year the previous generation had got) then did the exact opposite and tripled the price when awarded the power to do something about it.

I can't bring myself to ever trust a word they say again. And anyone that says the Tories stopped them, they were the only thing keeping the Tories in power, they were a VoNC away from potentially preventing 15 years of Tory kleptocracy and all the damage they caused (and that's without going into how those Tory governments repeatedly normalised increasingly far-right positions)

At best they're entirely useless at worst they're just another shade of Tory

Free uni was abolished over a decade ago

How's that possible? Genuinely wondering, I'm from a country with free uni which is still cheap ish if you don't qualify for free for some reason. I understand the concepts of tuition and loans, I'm just wondering how the loan ends up so far underwater if you've been paying.