The total student debt has doubled since the introduction of the loan system. Students have large debts amounting to tens of thousands of euros and now the interest rate is being increased considerably. Brabant students are also in deep trouble. “When you are young, you cannot actually imagine the amount you have borrowed.”
Gosling Grutters from Cuijk studied chemistry, but quit and started training to become a chemistry teacher in Nijmegen. “Partly because of corona and because I had enough of my other studies.”
He has had to borrow ‘relatively little’ so far. “In my first year I didn’t borrow anything and worked a lot, so my debt is relatively low at three thousand euros,” says Gosling, who still lives at home with his parents. He is thinking of canceling his loan. “I still have to calculate how much I get per month and whether I have to work extra.”
“I’m not thinking about it too much for now.”
“Yes, I borrowed quite a lot,” says Eline de Korte from Tilburg. She is 22 and a fourth-year Event Management student at BUAS in Breda and almost finished. She has a debt of 38,000 euros.
“I worry a lot, especially for the future. How am I ever going to get a house with such a debt?” she wonders. “My father said it was fine to borrow because the interest rate was zero percent anyway.” She didn’t use it all, but she did use up ‘more than half’.
Last year the interest rate increased from 0 to 0.46 percent. This week it became clear that the interest on student debt will increase five times from January and rise to 2.56 percent. A debt like Eline’s quickly amounts to around a thousand euros in interest per year. Eline does not yet take the future repayments on her debt into account. “I’m still a student right now and I’m not thinking about it too much for the time being.”
“You also just want to live and be a student.”
26-year-old Jelle Oosterveld has lived in Tilburg for seven years, where he studied Journalism at Fontys. He finished his training last summer. “I’m really in the middle of the unlucky generation,” he is disappointed. Jelle now works as a freelance editor and has a student debt of ‘just over 50,000 euros’ despite extra financial support from his parents.
“In the beginning I was still able to make ends meet, but when prices started to rise it became less and less so,” he says. “You just want to live and be a student, so yes, you sometimes spend fifty euros in the pub for an evening.”
His guilt is not exceptional, says Jelle. “50,000 is not a strange amount. I know others who have borrowed that much, sometimes even more. I have friends who had problems arranging a mortgage.” For a long time, Jelle was not worried at all about his student debt. “That has now increased.”