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.

The report also found that government borrowing would barely be affected by the move and the freeze on repayment thresholds was also deemed useless, despite adding a further £3,000 on the average graduate’s tuition bill.

Half of graduates will be loaded with another £6,000 in debt from 2016.

Labour shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna used the opportunity to attack the student finance proposals set out in Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget.

“After tripling student fees in the last Parliament, now ministers are burdening the poorest students with more debt while cutting funding for universities,” he said.

“As the IFS highlights, the replacement of maintenance grants with loans will raise debts for the poorest students and won’t improve government finances in the long term.

“Instead of investing in future generations, the government is making life harder for people who want to get on, massively increasing the cost of higher education, particularly for the poorest students.”