Over 100,000 graduates move abroad – leaving taxpayers to pay off £3bn in student loans

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Over 100,000 graduates move abroad – leaving taxpayers to pay off £3bn in student loans

Tens of thousands of university graduates have vanished abroad, leaving £2.8bn in unpaid student debt, The Telegraph can reveal.

Figures from the Student Loans Company (SLC) show the body is trying to trace 112,000 “runaway” graduates who live overseas and are not actively repaying their loans.

Of those, 73,000 are *** natives who completed a university degree here but have

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. They have a total outstanding loan balance of £2bn – or £27,000 each.

The remaining 39,000 were born abroad but took advantage of the loan system to fund their education at *** institutions. They owe £778m collectively. Any money SLC fails to recoup is ultimately paid for by the taxpayer.

Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “This represents a monumental and

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“We have become the mugs, dimwits and pea brains of university education worldwide. The SLC is little more than a free access cash machine for spongers.”

An SLC spokesman said not all the students are missing and may be between jobs or in the process of letting the authorities know their whereabouts.

Graduates who studied at *** universities then moved abroad are still liable to repay their debts so long as they are earning above the repayment threshold.

For the 2025-26 tax year, the earning repayment threshold is £26,065 for Plan 1 loans; £28,470 for Plan 2 loans; £32,745 for Plan 4 loans and £25,000 for Plan 5 loans.

However , moving abroad makes graduates more difficult to identify as authorities do not have access to their tax records.

The SLC is attempting to establish links with EU authorities and governments across the world to track down those not repaying their loans.

The figures show that the amount of unpaid loans, where the debtor has gone missing but is believed to be abroad, rose by £1.2bn in the last 24 months – at a rate of £11.5m a week.

Bosses at the SLC said not all these former students – who they call “unverified customers” – will be liable to pay back their loans as some may not be working, may be between jobs,

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Of these “unverified customers” more than 11,600 are believed to have moved to Australia, 6,100 to the US and almost 4,500 each in Spain and Ireland.

There are also almost 4,500 in the UAE, 1,200 in China, 2,700 in Bulgaria and 2,200 in Romania.

A spokesman for SLC said: “SLC is committed to continually improving the efficiency of our systems and processes, which has resulted in improvements in the verification of customers in repayment.

“In 2023-24, we verified the residency and employment statuses of 91.5pc of customers in repayment, surpassing the annual target of 90pc and at a time when the number of customers entering repaying continues to grow across all repayment categories, including the number of customers living overseas.”

Graduates intending to move abroad for three months or more are urged to inform SLC via an overseas income assessment form.

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