Alexandra Janssen will have to take a day off from her job as functional manager at TU/e on Wednesday, but she feels it is right to go and protest at the Lower House. “My children would gladly have gone themselves, but deadlines and presentations for their studies got in the way. Two of my three children have student debts of at least 20,000 euros. Soon they will enter the labor market without a penny to their names. That debt will also affect their chances of getting a mortgage. When they took out the loan, they were reassured that the interest rate would be close to zero percent. The recent announcement that the interest rate will be five times higher is the last straw for me. I’m joining the protests.” Janssen is referring to the protest organized by the LSVb and the petition that was initiated by other parents, which has already been signed almost 57,000 times.

Unfair

“My children, and the 900,000 other “sandwich students” who were caught between two periods of basic student grants, are at a 3-0 disadvantage. They are facing debt and rising interest rates, reduced mortgage opportunities and higher energy costs. These are consequences of government decisions and it’s not at all surprising that students feel like they’re being treated unfairly.” Janssen calls the compensation that politicians agreed to when they reinstated the basic student grant a joke. “It’s a total of 1,100 euros per student. I’ve done the math and the combined costs for my three children could amount to a hundred thousand euros by the end of their studies.”

Janssen cannot predict how crowded it will be in The Hague, but she knows that the protest has received a lot of attention on Instagram and LinkedIn. She has also called on her colleagues at LIS to join or at least sign the petition. “This is a way to voice our concerns. Politicians need to hear the financial distress of the bad-luck generation.”