[keithwalton]

You start paying interest on your student loan from day 1, but you dont know how much it is until a year later when they kindly send you a statement saying you owe us so much 'but its ok you dont have to pay us yet but we will keep on adding interest on it at an ever increasing rate'.

Personally i'd prefer to have a £4000 total loan charged at 7% interest than a £12000 total loan charged at 3%.

They may sound nice in that you dont have to pay it if you cant afford it and all that. But they will add a nice tidy sum on top of it for you. I'm not going to do a phd because I will have 3 years worth of interest added to my loan (around a further thousand, just think what you could do with a grand!)

Edit - Oh I have noticed the big picture plan from the governement regarding education, get as many people into university as you can by lull'ing them into a false sense of security and once there nice and settled jack the cost up!

Just as a random statistic, for the department i'm in, from its annual budget 20% of its annual income comes from the governement, 10% from student tution fees, the other 70% from r&d and consultancy work