"The debt going up doesn't seem very fair. I'll probably end up owing $80,000," she said.

But it still hasn't deterred her from taking relatively expensive courses - she does international relations and arts, and arts degrees tend to be much more pricy than science degrees.

"I still want to do what I am passionate about. I understand that that comes from a privileged mindset but I'm not willing to sell my soul for economic reasons".

But not selling her soul for economic reasons has a cost. She works about ten hours a week as a cashier at a supermarket.

And she has pushed the thought of repayment into the future while recognising that a debt will eventually head her way.

"I understand that it will take a long time to pay off and it will eat into my other saving goals. I've given up hope of trying to buy a house."

Everybody you meet on the campus of the Australian National University seems to have a job, something which would be strange to anybody who studied before student loans came out in 1989 as the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (usually referred to as HECS, with HECS debts).

Isla Robertson's friend, Nurul Azhar, works at a supermarket checkout and makes some money babysitting to pay for courses for her degree in Earth Sciences.

She find the cost of education "outrageous".

"It's really important to have a university education because the aim is to keep the economy going, and to do that, you need a lot of educated people," she said.

Twenty-year-old Esther Duve has two jobs, including working in a restaurant to help fund her degree in environment and sustainability. They take up about 20 hours of her week, and works the hours around face-to-face teaching at the university.

She calculates that her debt per semester is $3000 but she tries to pay off $1000 of that to whittle the loan down, particularly when it's mounting steeply with the price index.

She also wants to get the loan down to improve her credit rating.

"It impacts how I get a loan for buying a house," she said.

She has also cut down the number of courses she takes in order to save money. Her three courses are cheaper than the previous four.

The people who are far less exercised about the rising debts are the engineering students.

Under a federal government revamp in 2020, priorities were changed so that arts degrees became more expensive and science and technology degrees became cheaper. The rationale was that people needed to be encouraged to study subjects with more immediate and obvious benefit to the economy.

Toby Davis, in the third year of a five year degree, was out on the ANU campus propounding his Christian faith. He said the main reason he chose engineering was because "I enjoy engineering more".

But he did admit that at one stage he had toyed with the idea of an arts degree. One of the reasons he didn't make the switch was "because arts degrees are much more expensive".

Three 18-year-old first-year students, Sara, Risandi and Amelia, sat in a line outside the book shop and reckoned that the debt for their engineering degrees would be around $8,000 each.

They're happy to pay what is a relatively small amount.

"I've got a friend who's going to pay $100,000," Sara said.

"I'm a bit worried about the debt but I think I'll get a good paying job," she added.

"I thought about the money aspect but compared with other courses , I'm happy with what I've got to pay," Risandi said.

"I wasn't going to take a course I didn't want to do because of money," Amelia said.

"And it's a long way off."