If you went to university before 1998, you paid nothing. Not a penny. The state covered your tuition, and a maintenance grant helped with the living costs on top. It’s a fact that tends to silence a room when you say it out loud to anyone under thirty-five.
The debate over generational luck has flared up again, prompted by Evan Davis asking a rather pointed question on BBC Radio 4: were the baby boomers simply born at the right time? The evidence, when you stack it up, is fairly uncomfortable reading for anyone who graduated before the millennium.
Consider the specifics. A baby boomer who bought a terraced house in London in 1980 for around £20,000 has watched that same property climb past £500,000. Meanwhile, the average UK graduate today leaves university carrying roughly £45,000 in student loan debt, stepping into a housing market where the average first-time buyer deposit sits at over £50,000. The maths doesn’t work, and everyone knows it.
“We didn’t design the system,” one boomer caller told Davis during the programme. “We just lived in it.” Which is true, of course. But it doesn’t make the asymmetry any less stark.
There’s a counter-argument worth taking seriously. Boomers lived through genuine economic turmoil, with 15% mortgage interest rates in the early 1990s, high unemployment in the eighties, and none of the instant information or connectivity that younger generations take for granted. Life wasn’t simply handed to them on a plate.
And yet. Free education, final salary pensions, affordable housing, and the full benefit of the NHS before its long fiscal squeeze. That combination, arriving together in a single lifetime, is historically extraordinary. It’s probably never happened before and, on current trajectories, won’t happen again.
The younger generation’s frustration isn’t really about blaming their grandparents. It’s about watching a ladder get pulled up, not out of malice, but simply because nobody thought to leave it in place. The policy choices that built that boomer golden age were political decisions, and political decisions can be revisited.
The real question isn’t whether boomers were lucky. They were. The question is whether any political party has the nerve to say so, and do something about it before the resentment hardens into something nobody can walk back from.
