One in five graduates would have been better off financially if they had never gone to university. That figure comes from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and it is the one that gets quoted.
The other four in five are the story. And which group a student ends up in is decided less by whether they go than by what they study, which is decided at sixteen, by the choice of three A-levels.
Here is the arithmetic, with the sources, because the question deserves better than a slogan in either direction.
What a Degree Costs a 2026 Starter
For a student starting in the 2026/27 academic year, the maximum tuition fee loan is £9,790 a year. The maximum maintenance loan for a student living away from home outside London is £10,830.
Over a standard three-year course, borrowing the maximum of both:
| Per year | Three years | |
|---|---|---|
| Tuition fee loan | £9,790 | £29,370 |
| Maintenance loan, away from home, outside London | £10,830 | £32,490 |
| Total borrowed | £20,620 | £61,860 |
Those figures are from GOV.UK's student finance guidance. A London student borrows more, up to £14,135 a year in maintenance, which takes the three-year total past £72,000.
Sixty two thousand pounds is a number that stops conversations. It should not, because it is not a debt in any sense a family would recognise.
Why It Is Not a Debt
A student starting now is on Plan 5, and Plan 5 behaves like a tax, not a loan. Three features matter.
You repay 9% of what you earn above £25,000. Not 9% of the loan. 9% of the earnings above the threshold, regardless of whether you borrowed £30,000 or £72,000.
Interest is RPI plus nothing. Plan 5 charges interest at the Retail Price Index with no margin on top, so in real terms the balance does not grow. This is a real difference from the older Plan 2, where interest ran above inflation and borrowers could end up repaying more than they borrowed in real terms.
It is written off 40 years after the April you were first due to repay. Whatever is left at that point disappears.
Put those together and the monthly payment has nothing to do with the size of the loan. A graduate on £32,000 pays £630 a year whether their balance is £40,000 or £75,000.
How Long Does It Actually Take to Pay Back?
This is the question parents ask and almost nobody answers with a number. Because Plan 5 interest is RPI with no margin, the arithmetic can be done in today's money and it is not complicated.
On a £61,860 balance, repaying 9% of earnings above £25,000:
| Average salary | Repaid per year | Years to clear | What happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| £28,000 | £270 | 229 | Written off |
| £32,000 | £630 | 98 | Written off |
| £35,000 | £900 | 69 | Written off |
| £40,000 | £1,350 | 46 | Written off |
| £45,000 | £1,800 | 34 | Cleared |
| £50,000 | £2,250 | 27 | Cleared |
| £60,000 | £3,150 | 20 | Cleared |
| £75,000 | £4,500 | 14 | Cleared |
| £100,000 | £6,750 | 9 | Cleared |
The break-even is a career average of about £42,200 in today's money. Earn less than that across your working life and the loan is never repaid; it is written off after 40 years and you have paid a 9% surcharge on earnings above £25,000 for four decades.
That reframes the whole question. For a large proportion of graduates, the cost of university is not £61,860. It is 9% of their earnings over £25,000 for most of their working life, and the headline balance is a number on a statement that never gets cleared.
Two consequences follow, and they point in opposite directions.
For a student who will earn modestly, the loan is cheap, because they will never repay most of it. The sticker price is irrelevant to them.
For a student who will earn well, the loan is expensive, because they will repay all of it plus inflation. A doctor or a City analyst pays the full £61,860 in real terms, and clears it in their thirties or forties rather than their twenties.
What a Degree Is Actually Worth
The best UK evidence is the IFS study The impact of undergraduate degrees on lifetime earnings. Its central findings:
- Gross lifetime earnings rise by around £240,000 for men and £140,000 for women in discounted terms.
- After tax and student loan repayments, the net gain falls to around £130,000 for men and £100,000 for women. In percentage terms, roughly a 20% gain in net lifetime earnings for both.
- 85% of women and around three-quarters of men achieve positive net returns. Which is where the one-in-five figure comes from.
- The top 10% of graduates gain more than half a million pounds.
Now the number that gets left out. The IFS puts median net lifetime returns at around £70,000 for both men and women.
The median is well below the mean because a small number of very high earners drag the average up. So the typical graduate does not gain £100,000 or £130,000. They gain about £70,000 over a working life, which is real money and is a great deal less than the headline implies.
The Spread by Subject Is the Whole Answer
This is where "is university worth it" stops being one question.
The IFS finds net discounted lifetime returns that are:
- Close to zero on average for women graduating in creative arts and languages.
- Negative on average for men graduating in creative arts and social care.
- More than £250,000 for women graduating in law, economics or medicine.
- Around £500,000 for men graduating in medicine or economics.
A half-million-pound gap between subjects, inside the same decision. Which means the honest answer to a parent asking whether university is worth it is: worth it for what?
It also means the financial decision is not really made at eighteen when a student picks a university. It is made at sixteen, when they pick three A-levels, because those three subjects decide which degrees are open to them at all.
A student without Maths cannot read economics at most competitive universities. A student without Chemistry and Biology cannot read medicine anywhere. The subjects that lead to the highest-returning degrees are the ones with the hardest prerequisites, and those prerequisites are chosen two years before anyone is thinking about returns.
Our guide to A-level combinations and the jobs they lead to maps that out in detail, and facilitating subjects explained covers which subjects keep the most doors open.
What This Means in Practice at Sixteen
Five things worth holding onto.
1. The loan is not the problem. A family worrying about £62,000 of debt is worrying about the wrong thing. Nobody pays it back out of savings and nobody is chased for it. The real cost is 9% of earnings above £25,000, for up to 40 years.
2. The subject matters more than the university. The IFS finds substantial differences in returns between subjects and much smaller ones between university groups, particularly for women. A good subject at an ordinary university beats a weak subject at a famous one, financially.
3. A-level choice is the binding decision. Not the UCAS form. Whether Maths, Further Maths, Chemistry or Physics are on the timetable at sixteen determines what is available at eighteen. A-level combinations for university courses sets out which courses each combination opens.
4. Returns are averages, not promises. The IFS is explicit that variation within a subject is large, especially for men in high-return subjects. A degree is not a contract.
5. The non-financial case is a separate case, and a legitimate one. None of these figures measure whether somebody should study history because they want to understand history. They measure money. Families are entitled to decide that money is not the only axis, and plenty do. What they are not entitled to is to be told the money question has an obvious answer.
The Short Version
For a 2026 starter, three years costs about £61,860 borrowed, repaid at 9% of earnings above £25,000 with inflation-only interest and a 40-year write-off. You need to average about £42,200 to repay it in full; below that it is written off.
The average graduate gains around £100,000 to £130,000 in net lifetime earnings and the median gains about £70,000. One in five would have been financially better off not going.
Which one a student turns out to be is driven mostly by subject, and subject is driven by the three A-levels chosen at sixteen. That is the decision that is actually worth agonising over. The loan is not.
