We were told student loans were about opportunity; invest in yourself, get a degree, secure your future! With more than £266 billion outstanding1 and average debts above £50,0002, the terms can change after signing, allowing interest to compound faster than repayments—while the lender remains a government institution. So we have to ask a deeper question: what is this system really designed to produce and who is it supposed to benefit?
Why are student loans not normal loans
In today’s video, Kal Sandu, a former practicing lawyer, explains an uncomfortable truth in relation to student loans. For a start, these aren’t normal loans. Interest on student loans, unlike other loans, compounds aggressively because the interest rate charged stays higher than the rate of inflation. In simple terms this means that just as your grocery bill has no doubt increased in the last few years, so would your student loan repayments. This is very different to your normal bank loan where, as inflation increases, as long as your income increases in line with it, you can actually pay off your loan faster! That is because, with a bank loan, the debt amount stays the same while your income increases! In effect, if your bank were to give you the same terms and conditions as the Student Loan Company, it would be called a scam.
As an illustration of the impact of student loans, last year just over £15 billion in interest was added, while only £5 billion was repaid, meaning debts rising faster than people’s incomes can keep up with, even when they’re being paid on time. In line with that, under the newer terms, far fewer loans are being written off, meaning repayments can stretch up to 40 years. Longer than some mortgages!
What is the real issue beyond the financial implications
But the real issue isn’t just financial. It’s to do with control. As Mr Sandhu explains, the student’s loan has in effect become a “graduate tax.” What’s worse is that the Student Loan Company knows most undergraduates who take these loans out aren’t financially savvy to realise this and so most are completely unaware of what they are signing up to. Banks themselves certainly aren’t allowed to do this and even have checks in place specifically to prevent it. If such checks didn’t exist, the banks would likewise be able to scam their customers.
But student loans are being sold as a means of empowerment, not the financial enslavement they actually are! In practice, they are binding young people into a system whose rules they didn’t understand and which can change at will. So students are bound to play by its rules for decades and therefore become trapped.
How do student loan repayments affect life milestones and why does the Establishment love this?
Mr Sadhu explains, when repayments rise with income, some people avoid seeking promotions. Others delay buying homes, starting businesses, or having families. Surveys have linked student debt to the postponement of important life milestones in millions of people’s lives. In effect debt shapes behaviour, making you easier to be controlled!
When you leave university owing tens of thousands, your appetite for risk shrinks overnight. Starting a business becomes “too dangerous.” Taking a lower-paid but meaningful path in life feels irresponsible and untenable. Speaking out at work becomes even harder when you need to keep up with your loan repayments.
A heavily indebted graduate is far more likely to prioritise stability over personal sovereignty, a steady salaried job over entrepreneurship, compliance over dissent. And from the state’s perspective, a workforce of long-term employees is predictable. Employees pay income tax consistently. They are visible in the system. Their repayments are automated. Their financial lives are trackable.
When the majority are nudged into employment-for-life models, you don’t just work to live, you work to service the establishment. To service debt. To service tax. To service a structure that quietly narrows your choices. Control like this rarely feels like being controlled, it feels like practicality, but control it is indeed.
A society that truly wanted to unleash human potential in its citizens would remove any unnecessary psychological anchors or barriers to growth and development. It would not entrap and stifle them at 18 years old or any other age. Debt that follows you for 30–40 years isn’t just a financial millstone. It’s a behavioural controlling mechanism. It prevents you from taking the steps and risks necessary for becoming the version of yourself you have always wanted to become. This is a scam that keeps you under the Establishment’s control, exactly what it’s designed to do.
What can we do about it?
The answer isn’t just outrage, though if you can use that outrage constructively it will surely help. You won’t beat such scams that are designed to create dependency by merely complaining about it. You need to break free and outgrow it.
Reclaim economic leverage by building your character. Develop skills that the market genuinely rewards. For example, look at the areas of your character that you consistently struggle with most. These may be areas such as discipline, courage, integrity, long-term and strategic thinking. This is important because internal freedom is harder to control than external circumstances.
To do this, we advise you become part of a real community: with people who healthily collaborate, mentor, hold each other accountable and even create ventures together. Look beyond building “contacts” on social media and look towards building meaningful partnerships in life and business.
Shift from being a passive consumer of consumer products to becoming a creator. A creator of what? Solutions to problems that others have. Become more strategic in your thinking. In other words, learn how to create and build value! To learn more about how to do this, please sign up here and a member of our team will be in touch with you.
You can watch Mr Sandhu’s entire video here.
- https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/SN01079./ ↩︎
- https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/SN01079./ ↩︎
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Finance Scamtology: How Elon Musk Is Controlled By The Banking Elite
Jeffrey Leigh-Jones – Victim to Scamtologist Predator – Part 1: How The BBC Groomed Jeffrey Leigh-Jones to Become Their Living Sacrifice
This is one of the biggest scams: that we grow up trusting the establishment and believing they want what’s best for us. Instead, we are put through an education system that often makes us more dependent and disempowered and pushes many into debt. What Mr. Sandhu shares here makes it clear how significant this issue is and how heavy a burden is placed on people. This creates unnecessary fear, and is to many like a tool of control by the government and establishment. Thank you for bringing this topic further into the public conversation.
This frankly sickens me. As if it was not a scam enough to process students through university with largely useless degrees. They have to pay for the privilege of it, sold a “loan” that’s actually worse than a loan shark deal in many cases? Except this shark is the government itself. We need a complete overhaul here of the so-called education institution. God bless and have mercy on the students walking into classrooms in this day and age.
This is eye-opening to say the least. I look back at how I was sold the dream of a university education and how it was in reality. It was pitched that somehow this 3-4 year experience would be the key to lifelong success and happiness.
Looking back on reflection, it was a strategic masterstroke for the establishment; exponentially increase the number of students whilst simultaneously and exponentially increasing the tuition fees payable.
Now we have a situation where the value of a degree is watered down (because more are issued), but the cost has increased. When this is combined with the scam of student loans that I’m struggling to get my head round, the ultimate losers are the graduates. Young, naive and vulnerable, but exploited to the hilt.
What we see now are professors actively recruiting for Masters Programmes based on the fact that final year students haven’t been able to work out what they want to do with their lives during a 3-4 year period designed to set them up for life! This is daylight robbery, but I don’t see any BBC documentaries on this scam which is massively in the public interest!!
Wow!!! We were all sold an absolute snook! Not to mention that hardly anyone actually ends up using the degree they studied for at university. This is exactly what I was told: “You only have to pay it back when you earn over a certain amount.” I can see now how that subconsciously lowered my expectations and limited my potential.
On top of that, it’s a complete scam designed to control us. This has been so eye-opening—the number of people who get incredibly distressed by debt, the lack of financial education at a young age… no one should be signing contracts for such enormous sums when the whole system is essentially a scam!
God bless and help my generation, the ones to come, and all those affected. Thank you so much for this article and update, for sharing the work of Mr. Sandhu, and highlighting what Lighthouse offers as a solution to this tyrannical system. Incredible.
Scamming adults is bad enough, but scamming children is despicably evil. Coming out of high school, being scammed into going to university, so they can get a degree so they can get a highly paid job. They are sold on the idea and then, bam, get a student loan to get you through university.
None of us are educated in how to deal with debt, it is highly stressful. The control the establishment have, increasing repayments as your salary increases, you can’t hide anything from them. So the more you earn, the more they take.
I pray students around the world read this, article, especially those looking into getting student loans.
God bless them and all of us.
It kills when we start seeing this. Student loans essentially become a way of indebting someone so they are consistently giving more to the government. Phew, when I look at it, it is diabolical to put young people in that position, given how difficult it is even to get a job or build a life. The government can at any time change the terms, and there is something deeply wrong with that.
We all need to find ways to move away from the current systems. The most successful people do not go through the system, they go around it. They get mentorship, they study how to create value from people who know how to build it. They surround themselves with the right people. People must break free from this scam of education.
This is absolutely disgraceful! Having been part of this scam as a University student, I know I didn’t question how this all works at all. For young people, who are just learning how to manage basic things on their own and are there spewed out of the university pipeline into the world of employment, burdening them with a loan where the interest compounds faster than people can realistically repay, is deeply evil.
The establishment want indebted, dependent little workers and so keeping you in humongous debt, is a way to ensure you stay tethered to the system and its sinister agenda. God help those perpetuating this religion of Scamtology.
I truly feel sorry for the graduates of today. I was the last year that got a grant to go to university (and to be honest it was the state funding some of my drinking!) and I remember when the next year had to pay £1,000 per year ie £3,000 in total. Now it’s £9k+ plus inflation on accommodation (which to be fair is a much higher standard than what I had, but part of the experience was student digs!) so they are walking out with £50k debts. It’s a multi billion pound industry now. For a product that is largely unused!
Using debt to control peoples lives is evil, and we must watch for other areas where this tactic is used. It is good to know there are steps that can be taken and may God bless all those who are in student loan trap right now.
Yet another example of how the establishment are acting in their own interests and not the true interests of the people, but at their expense. Just the fact that student loans are allowed to operate under such terms where the private sector is not (and rightly so) due to the harm it would cause the public… that is absolutely a scam! How can one be allowed and the other not!? But what is so evil about this is that it’s all being justified and excused in the name of something good, in the name of giving young people an advantage and head start in life, when it’s actually destroying their future opportunities. It’s quite the masterstroke for enslaving our future generations with their consent, while making a massive profit in the meantime. Even worse is, how many of those university and higher education degrees and diplomas have actually enabled students to better realise their God-given potential? And how many have left them with little more than a certificate to hang on the wall and a few letters to put after their name? Our “education” system from beginning to end is a scam and needs completely overhauling.
This article really resonates with me because I live this. I took out student loans back in 2012 when fees went up to £9k, and we were repeatedly told it was “income-contingent,” fair, and manageable. What we weren’t told — and what we certainly didn’t agree to — was a system that could be retrospectively changed, or where interest would eventually dwarf anything you ever actually pay in. Now the interest added every year exceeds anything I’ve contributed, and it feels like a scam dressed up as policy. I’ve literally described it as an education tax before, it’s definitely “graduate tax”.
It’s infuriating and demoralising to see an entire generation trapped in this system — promised opportunity but left with debt that grows faster than our ability to pay it down. It doesn’t count towards your credit score or anything, but I think the most disappointing thing about it all is being scammed and lied to by your own government. Thank you for exposing how this isn’t just an accident but a structural flaw that benefits the establishment at the expense of young people’s futures. God bless everyone feeling this weight.