As of today, grants for low-income students wishing to study at university in England are to be replaced by loans. The measures, which were announced by George Osborne last year because of the apparent “basic unfairness in asking taxpayers to fund grants for people who are likely to earn a lot more than them”, ironically coincide with the announcement of a report that concluded that the overwhelming majority of graduates will not earn enough of a premium to make up the cost of their degrees.

Those of us who struggled through university as low-income students and benefited from the grant system sympathise deeply with those students who are younger than us and will miss out on this helping hand. Had the current arrangements been in place when we were considering our options, many of us would not have gone to university at all.

I know for a fact that I wouldn’t have. I went to university prior to the introduction of top-up fees and was lucky enough (in other words poor enough) to have my fees paid for by the government. But I will never forget how it felt to sign those loan forms. It was my 19th birthday and I felt physically sick. The sums of money that I would be borrowing were larger than any amount that I had contemplated before.

Throughout my teenage years, my mum had done an amazing job ensuring that I never felt impoverished, despite the fact that we lived off veggie stew, all our furniture was secondhand or donated by friends, and many of our Christmas presents came from charity shops. It is only relatively recently that I’ve really taken stock of just how skint we were. Going through the airing cupboard recently, I came across the handmade duvet covers I used, stitched together by my mother from old sheets, tablecloths, and bits of lace. They are beautiful, but they also made me cry.

Going from a home life where basic things are unaffordable to making a commitment to borrowing thousands and thousands of pounds when you are still a teenager is quite scary, to put it mildly. At university, you are mixing with people whose parents not only paid for their fees and accommodation up front (and even, in some cases, bought their children flats in their university towns) but who invest their student loans, and who receive generous allowances for living expenses. Low-income students got none of this, but at least the maintenance grant offered some comfort. It enabled me to buy the ludicrously expensive textbooks that others could afford, and helped to feed me.

Some will argue that the scrapping of the grants system in favour of loans will have very little financial impact on students’ day-to-day lives. After all, you only pay the loan back when you are earning enough to do so, like a sort of graduate tax. But such analysis ignores the cultural attitudes towards debt in many working-class communities. The ingrained attitude that you never borrow money acts as a barrier to many who would otherwise like to study.

I was very lucky in that it was always assumed that I would go to university. My grandparents instilled in their children the importance of education for furthering your life chances (two of my grandparents gained their degrees from night college), and my parents, who also benefited from the grants system, in turn instilled that in me. It was a privilege that meant I weighed it up and, believing that a degree would help me to live a more comfortable life, concluded that the future debt was worth it (I also coped through a certain amount of denial that it didn’t count as “real debt”). If you’re brought up in a family where the value of higher education is not at all emphasised, and on top of this the prospect of being in debt is unthinkable, how likely are you to then take it on?

There are other things at play, too. In a way, a maintenance grant represents a commitment on the part of the government to investing in young people from low-income families. It says: “You belong at university as much as anyone else. What you have to offer is important. We want you to be here.” Remove that commitment, and what message does that send?

Then, if you do get there, there’s the constant gnawing anxiety about being able to afford to stay. There were several occasions where I nearly dropped out due to the financial strain, and, because I was working shifts in a bar until 4am, I almost failed a core module. I was only able to stay as a result of my maintenance grant, the university hardship fund, a bursary, and a generous £50 a month and a laptop from my caring grandfather. But I was strung out and exhausted, and when a relative commented snidely that I had been “having trouble budgeting”, I felt a huge amount of shame. (The shame, incidentally, is why I am being honest about this now. I wonder how many struggling students there are out there who feel similarly embarrassed next to their wealthier peers).

When top-up fees were introduced, then raised, the presence of a grants system was repeatedly used as a rationale for why the new measures would not exclude poorer students from accessing higher education. Now the grants have been scrapped, and we risk becoming a country in which only a privileged ruling class can benefit from higher education. Couple this with the revelation that degrees might not even be worth the investment, and the sense of betrayal from those who have already graduated risks spilling over.

As for those yet to go, you wonder which rationally-minded low-income student might sign up for an education under this unfair system as it stands. Not me, and probably not many others, either.