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The UK is currently experiencing a period of considerable fiscal austerity. This has had profound implications for virtually all areas of public spending, including spending on higher education.
In this report, we use our own model of graduate earnings and repayments to produce an independent estimate of the long-run cost of providing student loans and we describe how this varies across the graduate earnings distribution. We also quantify some of the uncertainty around these estimates and illustrate the impact of potential changes to the terms under which student loans are offered.
Authors

Research Fellow University College London
Claire is a Research Fellow at IFS, working on the determinants and consequences of participation in childcare and education for parents and children.

Rowena Crawford

Research Associate
Wenchao is an Assistant Professor at the University of Sussex and an IFS Research Associate.
Report details
- DOI
- 10.1920/re.ifs.2014.0094
- Publisher
- Institute for Fiscal Studies
Suggested citation
C, Crawford and R, Crawford and W, Jin. (2014). Estimating the public cost of student loans. London: Institute for Fiscal Studies. Available at: https://ifs.org.uk/publications/estimating-public-cost-student-loans (accessed: 29 April 2025).
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