I’m a Boomer who started working full-time work from 15 years old. My first job was working for ICI, a major employer in my mid-Cheshire town. As a grammar school girl, it was a choice of ICI, a bank or a building society. I had wanted to continue in education, not necessarily to do A-levels, but to go to the local college, study business, and eventually train at a hotel and catering college. I wanted to become a hotel manager. But that was not the expectation around me.
My parents were clear: I should get a job and support myself. That was entirely normal at the time in the early 1970s, especially for girls. I have been working, in one form or another, for over 50 years since.
A few years later, in the late 70s, I convinced my parents to let my younger sister go to university; she had her fees paid and received a maintenance grant. But among the people we grew up with, most of the boys went into trades and most of the girls went into office work. Very few went to university.
This is not because they were weighing up fees or loans – like today’s young people who face tuition fees of almost £10,000 per year and an average debt of £55,000 when they graduate – but because it was not seen as the default pathway.
University participation rates in the early 1970s were below 15 per cent. University was selective, culturally distant for many families, and often actively discouraged rather than financially debated. I did not get that opportunity, and yet, when I look at what younger graduates face today, I cannot simply dismiss the argument that something in the system has become deeply unfair.
The scale of student debt now is stark. Many graduates leave university with repayments stretching across decades and interest accumulating in ways earlier generations never experienced. These debts shape young people’s decisions about housing, careers, and family life in ways that simply did not exist when higher education was funded differently.
While many older people – myself included – did not get to go, is true that those who did get to attend university before 1998 paid no tuition fees, and many received maintenance grants under a system established in the 1960s (means-tested tuition fees of £1k were introduced in 1998, this rose to £3k in 2006, and in 2012 to more than £9k a year). Those who went before ’98 were at a real structural advantage compared with the financial burden placed on students today, and it would be unrealistic to ignore that difference.
But the story does not end there.
Higher education in that era was not universal. It was a minority experience, shaped by class, geography, gender expectations, and limited places. My sister benefited from the grant-era system. Whereas I entered the workforce early and built my qualifications gradually over time, largely self-funded or supported by employers alongside full-time work. Both of us belong to the same generation, yet our educational experiences were entirely different. That variation matters when we talk about fairness.
Any suggestion of a blanket retrospective graduate tax aimed at “over-50s” risks flattening a generation into a single narrative of advantage. Many people in their fifties and sixties are not graduates at all. Perhaps they pursued vocational routes, apprenticeships, technical colleges, or employer-sponsored training rather than state-funded university education.
And many of those who did attend university under the grant system are now approaching retirement, on reduced incomes, or already drawing pensions. A repayment model designed around early or mid-career earnings sits very differently at that life stage.
None of this means it should be an automatic “no” to questions about a tax to help out young people, but it does require nuance.
Any discussion of contribution needs to distinguish between principle and policy. A simple retrospective graduate tax applied to everyone over 50 would be a blunt instrument. It would capture people like me who never attended university, those whose degrees were employer-funded, and those now living on modest retirement incomes. That risks creating a new form of unfairness while trying to solve an existing one.
It would also be administratively complex. Records of who studied under the pre-1998 system are not always complete or easily accessible, and designing a workable collection mechanism for people at very different life stages would require careful thought.
A more targeted approach could focus on those who clearly benefited from a fully state-funded university education and who remain in higher-earning brackets. But even then, the purpose of any contribution made by these Boomers would matter. If framed transparently as ring-fenced money to support higher education or ease the long-term burden on younger graduates, it may feel more justifiable than a general tax absorbed into wider government spending.
It is also worth remembering that intergenerational fairness is not only about who paid fees, but about the broader economic context each cohort faced. Earlier generations often entered the workforce sooner and navigated careers with far less flexibility and far less organisational support, including the absence of flexible working, remote options, and structured career development that many now take for granted. This does not cancel out the challenges younger graduates face today, but it does suggest that fairness cannot be measured by tuition fees alone.
I can see the moral case for asking whether those who genuinely benefited from a publicly-funded university education, and who have the financial means, might contribute something to a system that now places a far heavier burden on younger graduates. The principle of intergenerational fairness is not unreasonable. Nor is the frustration felt by younger people repaying loans for decades while hearing that previous cohorts studied without fees.
What I resist is the lazy shorthand that assumes all Boomers received the same advantages. The past was not a golden age of universal opportunity. It was a narrower system, with fewer places, stronger social expectations, and very different routes into work and learning.
Many of us began earning, paying tax, and contributing to the economy far earlier than today’s graduates, often funding our education later in life rather than receiving it upfront.
Also, the last generation to experience free tuition is not simply “the over-50s”. In reality, it includes many people now in their mid-40s, while large numbers in their 50s and 60s never attended university at all.
Younger graduates deserve a system that is sustainable and fair. Their financial reality is fundamentally different from the one my generation faced, and it is reasonable to question how higher education should be funded going forward. But any proposal for retrospective contributions must be carefully designed, targeted, and sensitive to the diversity of life paths within older generations.
Some older graduates, particularly those who built well-paid careers directly on the back of a fully subsidised university education, may indeed have a reasonable case to contribute something. Others, who never attended university or who funded their learning through decades of work, should not be assumed to have benefited from a system they never used.
That complexity may be less headline-friendly than a simple generational divide. But it is closer to the truth. And if we are serious about fairness, it is truth, not shorthand, that should guide the conversation.
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