THE poorest students will end up in “substantially more” debt than their richer classmates after the abolition of tuition grants, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) warned yesterday.

In a new report, the IFS suggested that replacing maintenance grants with repayable loans would lead the poorest 40 per cent of English university students to graduate £53,000 in the red.

“It is little more than a tax on aspiration and exposes this government as certainly not being on the side of the strivers,” said academics’ union UCU secretary Sally Hunt.