Daily Telegraph: Lying or stupid?

I'm surprised that Leg-Iron fell for this clap trap in The Daily Telegraph:

Successful graduates will be penalised most by the introduction of variable interest rates on the loans they take out to pay the fees. A university leaver with debts of £30,000 and an annual salary of £45,000 will have to pay back about £2,160 a year for about 30 years. Someone earning £25,000 will have to pay £360 a year for the same debts because a lower interest rate will be applied.

Nope, nothing of the sort. The new rules appear to be (see Box here):
a) The nominal interest rate is set at nil if you earn less than £21,000; at the rate of inflation if you earn £21,000, with a sliding scale so that if you earn over £41,000, the rate is (inflation + 3%).
b) Your repayments (interest and principal) are set at 9% of your gross salary minus £21,000,
c) After thirty years, any residual debt is written off.

It is rules b) and c) which make all the difference - not rule a).

a) If our higher earner on £45,000 a year repays £2,160 a year for thirty years to repay an initial debt of £30,000, the implied nominal interest rate is 5.92% using Excel's IRR function. If we assume 3% inflation + 3%, that means the real interest cost is in fact 3% (by definition). This is the worst-of-all worlds in terms of the total nominal repayments - if you earned less, some of the principal would still be outstanding after thirty years and would be waived (see c); and if you earned more, you would repay the debt much more quickly.

b) So if you earn £45,000, your repayments are (£45,000 - £21,000) x 9% = £2,160. If you earn £25,000, your repayments are (£25,000 - £21,000) x 9% = £360, which tallies with what the article says.

c) Which is why the graduate who earns £25,000 would only repay part of the interest and none of the principal on the debt, whereas the higher earner would repay it in full.

This is just the way the rules work. It has little to do with the interest rates.
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Of course, the lefties are just as bad - they claim that a higher earner would pay less interest than somebody on a lower salary. Also complete bollocks:

For sure - somebody who earns £100,000 a year graduating with £30,000 of student debt would repay (£100,000 - £21,000) x 9% = £7,110 a year for five years and that would be the end of that, so he pays about £5,550 in nominal interest (in real terms, he pays half that).

A median earner on £25,000 would pay £360 x 30 years = £10,800 nominal interest (nothing in real terms) - and also gets the £30,000 waiver after thirty years. And if somebody earns less than that - let's say £21,000 - he pays neither interest nor principal - and also gets the £30,000 waiver after thirty years. The lefties focus on the £10,800 nominal interest paid by Mr £25,000 and gloss over the 'waiving' bit at the end.

But... the worst case scenario is somebody who earns £45,000 a year - he repays (£45,000 - £21,000) x 9% = £2,160 a year but this is just enough to cover the interest and principal repayments over thirty years and his nominal interest cost is £34,800 (in real terms, he pays half that), so yes, he pays more than the person who earns £100,000.
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So in a bizarre sort of way, they are both complaining about the same thing: The Torygraph is complaining that Mr £45,000 pays more than Mr £21,000 - and Red Ed is complaining that Mr £45,000 pays more than Mr £100,000!!
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The way round all this would be to go back to the old ways and have fixed repayment terms that treat everybody the same - if you have a student loan, the interest rate is set at below market rates (let's say inflation) and the fixed repayment term is ten years (or whatever it was, I know I paid off a student loan after 1996 from the interest I was earning on the proceeds of the loan that I had promptly paid into an ISA account).

In olden times, your income was irrelevant in calculating the amount repaid each month, unless you earned very little (less than £12,000 a year, from memory). Once I'm in charge, the repayments will simply deducted from your Citizen's Income, of course, to save 'churn'.