Catherine Byrne is a young woman who recently secured £14,000 in student loans, which she then spent on breast enlargement surgery so as to allow her to pursue a career in glamour modelling.
The loans do not need to be repaid until she starts earning £17,335 per year, and will be written off after twenty-five years if she never earns that much. Miss Byrne intends never to earn that much, and never to repay any of her student debt.
So far as I am aware she has not broken any law.
Miss Byrne is far from alone. While I am not aware of any other person who has spent their student loans on cosmetic surgery, I am aware that many graduates try to exploit the earnings threshold so as to avoid paying off their graduate debt. I can't say I blame them.
Miss Byrne has said that her breast enlargement surgery has benefited her career more than any degree ever could, which may well be true. There are at present many thousands of graduates in this country who are either unemployed or else trapped in poorly paid jobs which they do not enjoy. By contrast, Miss Byrne can realistically hope to earn £17,000 per year working only fairly modest hours.
She is quoted as saying that she is probably happier than most of the people who enrolled on the course at the same time as her, and I won't argue with that.
As Omar Khayyam noted more than nine hundred years ago: Make game of that which makes as much of thee.
Related previous posts include:
The sordid truth about far too many young people
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