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Student Debt Does Not Quash Entrepreneurial Spirit |
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| 09/09/2006 | |
| But there is a job to be done nurturing first year enthusiasm through to graduation says NCGE report Student debt does not have a negative or detrimental affect on aspiring entrepreneurs determined to start up in businesses, according to a new NCGE and Barclays report, Nascent Graduate Entrepreneurs, which explores the impact of student debt on plans to go it alone. Despite the average level of student debt on graduation reaching a new high of £11,900, the number of students anticipating setting up on their own immediately after graduation has remained constant at four per cent regardless of their levels of debt. This equates to around 30,000 students across the entire HE cohort of some 750,000 undergraduates. At the same time, the report does show that final year students are more likely than first year students to defer their plans to start up on their own until they have reduced their levels of debt with sixty per cent of final year students claiming they would defer their enterprise plans rather than scale back, compared to 55 per cent of first years. Just 15 per cent of final year students claim they would scale back plans rather than defer, compared to 21 per cent of first years. The report's findings are good news for the UK's enterprise economy but send a clear message to those involved in encouraging students to consider self-employment to nurture the obvious entrepreneurial zest and flair demonstrated in the first year of education right through to the final year and beyond. This means recognising, encouraging and rewarding students and graduates whose fledgling enterprises could be a success and a future inspiration. It is also important that students are made to realise that whilst entrepreneurship does imply acceptance of calculated risk, a degree of financial burden need not be an impediment to getting off the starting blocks. Work must be done, for example, to underline the conditions of student loan repayments which are not unfavourable to graduate entrepreneurs, a point is all too often lost in media presentation of the black cloud of student debt. In fact, students should be made aware that they would do well to start their own businesses quickly, because the self-employed only become liable to pay back debt once their business is in profit by more than £15,000. The research The research was conduced by NOP on behalf of Barclays Bank and the National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship (NCGE) and was conducted from 31 May 2005 - 7 June 2005 among 2,005 current students; 668 interviews with students in the first year of their study, 583 in their second year, 561 in their third year and 193 in their fourth or subsequent year of study. Barclays has undertaken a survey of student debt for several years and this research is part of this on-going body of work. |
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