WITH Firstborn now in gainful employment, he has been checking up to see how much he will be expected to pay off his university tuition fee loan.

As he was fortunate enough to have embarked on his degree four years ago when fees stood at £3,000 a year his total debt is a relatively modest £13,000 or so.

From next April he will have a small amount deducted at source from his pay.

And in a few years time his debt should be cleared. He seems quite happy about this.

However, anyone who began their university education this year will cop the much greater fees of around £9,000 a year.

Add to that a maintenance grant of £3,575 each year and they’ll be graduating after three years with a debt of nearly £50,000.

By the time interest is added and they’ve finished paying they will have paid thousands more.

According to The Complete University Guide, repayments, based on a starting salary of £25,000, will start at £50 a month and rise to £280 a month.

It will take the average student 24 years to get rid of the debt.

The calculations are complex and depend on base interest rates and the level of graduate pay.

Payments kick in after a graduate reaches £21,000. After 30 years the debt will be written off.

Of course, as the Guide points out, this is if present rules and regulations remain in place.

And no-one can predict what interest rates will be in the future or whether graduates will continue to earn an average of £25,000 after leaving university.

I suspect that this system will be found to be unsustainable and the whole ill-thought-out scheme will come back to bite a future Government.

As an employer, the Man-in-Charge has already encountered employees looking for part-time work who say they doubt whether they will ever pay back their student debt.

And that’s now when they have a comparatively small amount to pay back.

No matter how much politicians keep insisting that student loans are not debt, the fact remains that an entire generation is now being saddled with a HUGE amount of debt and faces having to pay it off throughout the house-buying and child-rearing years - the most expensive time of life.

Who, I wonder, will have anything left for paying into the Government’s new pension scheme – or any pension scheme come to that?

It is the law of unforeseen circumstances at work yet again.