Millions of graduates wake to student 'debt sentence'

Higher education loans are indexed in line with inflation on June 1 each year, but runaway price rises have caused balances to spiral and many graduates are tipped to be worse off than when they finished their studies.

Education Minister Jason Clare said while the average cost of HECS had gone up by $1700, it would not affect how much students pay back each year.

"HECS is not like a mortgage where when interest rates go up, your repayments go up. The amount that you pay each year is based on your income," he told Sydney radio 2GB on Thursday.

"If you go to uni, it makes you money. If you go to university, you're going to have a higher salary than if you don't."

Modelling conducted by the National Tertiary Education Union found loan increases may blow out repayment periods for some university degrees to more than four decades.

Business management graduates are likely to be the worst affected, owing nearly $120,000 over a repayment period of 44 years.

A humanities and social sciences honours degree could take 40 years to repay and cost $110,353.

The union's national president Alison Barnes said many students would spend most of their working lives paying off the debt.

"This is not what higher education should look like. It's a barrier to equality which must be a core principle of our universities," she said.

"Education is a fundamental right and should not lead to decades of financial burden. We need to address this issue."

The gender pay gap means female law graduates could take 36 years to pay off their qualification, four years longer than their male colleagues.

The federal government is set to profit about $2.5 billion off the back of student loan indexation this year.

Greens senator David Shoebridge said young people had been further disadvantaged by the indexation rise.

"Their rents are going through the roof, but their wages are stagnating, and ... hundreds of thousands of them have just been hit with an extra bill from the Albanese government," he told reporters.

Jane Body, 32, holds a bachelor of international relations and politics, a masters in business administration and a student debt of about $78,000.

If indexation continues to be tied to inflation, she's worked out she will be paying off her student loan until at least the age of 65.

"Young people are quite often left out of economic discussion and policy making decisions (but) a lot of Australia's policies are directly or indirectly age-based," she told AAP.

"Many policies are in favour of older generations at the expense of the younger generations."

Ms Body is the general manager of Think Forward which advocates for intergenerational fairness issues to be central in Australian politics.

"We are calling for a freeze on indexation so that at the very least we have time as a nation to have a conversation about how we can do this better," she said.

Indexing student loans to wages growth rather than inflation could be a fairer system which would match the value of different degrees, she said.