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“... In June​ , Philip Hammond, in his last few weeks as chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote to the candidates vying to succeed Theresa May as leader of the Conservative Party and asked them to pledge that, if elected, they would retain his target of bringing down national debt as a percentage of GDP. ‘If we do not commit to getting our debt down after a nine-year run of uninterrupted economic growth,’ he demanded, ‘how can we demonstrate a dividing line between the fiscal responsibility of our party and the reckless promises of John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn?’ Four years ago in these pages I warned that the government’s plans to bring down the headline debt figure through asset sales, including the sale of part of the student loan book, would mean a loss of millions of pounds to the Treasury (LRB, 5 March 2015 ...”

“... Student loans​ are in principle a straightforward business. The government lends students money; after they graduate, they begin repaying it. From the perspective of politicians and the Treasury the advantage of loans over grants is clear: the money isn’t simply given away, it comes back over the lifetime of the loan. Even better, in the national accounts the loans are classified as ‘financial transactions’, not ‘expenditure’, and are excluded from calculations of the deficit ...”

“... University; he is currently professor of higher education policy at Liverpool Hope University. Andrew McGettigan did his doctorate at the highly regarded Centre for Modern European Philosophy that Middlesex University summarily closed down in 2010; in recent years he has distinguished himself as one of the best-informed analysts of the legal and ...”

“... could be denied eligibility for future loans and so on. There is also the possibility, noted by Andrew McGettigan in The Great University Gamble (2013), that tranches of the student loan book could be sold off at differential rates depending on the ‘credit-worthiness’ of an institution’s cohort of graduates, something that could also affect a ...”