ABSTRACT
Students are taking on more and more student debt, but the potential for earning is decreasing. The current levels of high-unemployment amongst young people in the West mean that even those students with university qualifications are struggling to find work. The burden of debt is enormous on the UK’s ‘jilted generation’ (which Howker and Malik define as those born in the late 1970s or after)27 and yet this is the generation that will be responsible for supporting an economy with an unprecedented number of pensioners.28 As Stiglitz observes, student debt is a great perpetuator of inequality.29 In addition to persistent unemployment and mounting student debt, the ‘jilted generation’ will not make the same salaries as their parents’ generation, nor will they be able to retire as soon,30 or live as long. In this way, mounting student debt, unemployment and stagnant wages might well have repercussions for the economy as a whole and will impact future generations.
