Under the cloud: student debt is shaping the university experience
When I first arrived at university, I was focused on the things most students are focused on: making friends, finding my feet, and figuring out how to make a weekly food shop stretch further than it had any right to. The looming figure of my student loan sat somewhere in the background, acknowledged but not quite real. A future problem. Something to deal with later.
I suspect many students feel the same way. And yet, financial pressure is one of the most consistent and quietly influential forces shaping the university experience today. No one really prepares you for this. You get the prospectus, the open day tour, the photographs of students smiling. What you don’t get is a frank conversation about what it actually costs to be there, not just in money, but the mental energy spent worrying about it.
The number no one prepares you for
The headline figure for student debt in England is striking. Tuition fees currently sitting at £9,250 per year (Department of Education, 2024). Factor in maintenance loans, which vary based on household income and where you study, and the total debt students graduate with can exceed £45,000. That looming figure tends to live rent-free in the back of your mind long before repayments actually begin. It is, by any measure, a significant sum to carry into adult life.
But the crueller irony is that even while you are accumulating that debt, the money rarely stretches far enough. The maximum maintenance loan for a student living away from home outside London currently sits at around £10,227 per year. This may sound substantial until you realise that average student rent alone can consume nearly all of it before a single grocery shop, bus fare, or textbook has been bought. For many students, particularly those from lower-income households who receive less parental support, the loan is not a safety net; it is a starting deficit.
The part-time juggle
I, like a significant number of students, work part-time alongside my studies. Approximately 68% of full-time undergraduate students now engage in paid work during term time, representing a 12-percent-point increase since 2002 (Advance HE, 2025; Callender, 2008). For many, this is a genuinely positive experience. Earn some money, gain some experience, keep the overdraft at bay. Also, learning skills and developing traits such as time management, resilience, and particularly the art of remaining cheerful on very little sleep – all surprisingly useful for a psychology student.
What makes the difference, (and I’ve felt this directly), is whether your institution is set up to support you through it. Whether someone notices when you’re struggling, and whether the resources to help are within reach.
What universities can do, and what SUMS Group understands
This is where my internship at SUMS Group shifts my perspective in a way I hadn’t anticipated.
I arrived expecting to learn about administrative processes and institutional strategy, the kind of behind-the-scenes machinery that, as a student, you never really think about. What I didn’t expect was to find that so much of that work is, at its core, about us. Every catering contract, accommodation pricing decisions, and welfare allocation is a choice, made by real people with real consequences for students like me. I learnt how decisions made at an institutional level ripple out into the daily lives of students. My internship at SUMS Group has already taught me more about how universities actually function than three years of sitting in lectures ever did!
SUMS Group is a not-for-profit consultancy and procurement organisation that works with universities across the higher education sector, supporting higher education institutions to make those choices strategically, keeping students at the centre of operational planning. A well-negotiated food contract could mean a hot meal on campus that doesn’t require a student to choose between lunch and printing credit. A smarter accommodation strategy could mean one fewer student picking up a third shift just to cover rent.
Starting the conversation
I don’t think universities are indifferent to the financial realities of student life. But I do think the conversation is often too quiet. Students need more than signposting to a hardship fund. They need institutions that genuinely interrogate how debt shapes the student experience, from the moment an offer letter is accepted to the day a degree is collected.
My time at SUMS Group has made me more optimistic that this kind of thinking is happening and that there are people seriously working on how universities can do better by their students. However, optimism needs to translate into action.
So, let’s have it. The cloud of debt isn’t going anywhere. The question is whether we let it hang over an entire generation’s experience of higher education, or whether we build universities that acknowledge it, plan around it, and actively work to lighten it.
