Is it, really?

People say things like this a lot at the moment, but the objective reality is that for a lot of graduates in the current tuition fees and student loans system, they are leaving university already tens of thousands of pounds in debt.

Earning anything resembling a "normal" graduate salary -- which of course isn't guaranteed these days -- they will then be making repayments that effectively increase their marginal income tax rate by a whopping 9%.

And with the current rate of inflation and the 3% extra interest that gets added on top, most of those repayments will actually just be servicing interest.

Bottom line: a young person graduating this year will have huge debts at the start of their career, they could be facing an extra tax-like burden for most of their working lives, and they're entering a workforce that demands more and offers less than any previous generation in recent history has faced. And that's before you even consider things like the housing market or the likelihood of that generation receiving a useful state pension by the time they retire.

How is anything related to Brexit, even in the most negative possible outcome, going to have anywhere close to that effect on the life of a young person who graduates this year?

There were always unpleasant people using nationalism as cover for doing unpleasant things, even though the current sentiment in many western countries has brought them a higher profile. They're still a relatively small minority, they've never amounted to much before, and I don't see them achieving much in the long term either, even if they cause nasty irritation for a while. More generally, broader nationalist sentiment might lead to a more isolationist foreign policy for a while, with the pros and cons that brings, but talk of that getting us into a war any time in the near future seems hyperbolic.

Russian aggression in Eastern Europe seems a greater and more urgent threat in terms of geopolitical stability, but then NATO seems a more likely forum to moderate that influence than the EU. Given that even NATO has had a limited effect on Putin so far, I don't see the UK's membership or otherwise of the EU making much difference to anything in this respect. With the US not knowing what its foreign policy is from one day to the next under Trump and with many of the other relatively powerful European nations systematically underinvesting in defence for years, I think there are much more influential factors that would need to change here before Brexit started to have much relevance in this context.

Meanwhile, with the tuition fees and student loans system we now have and with current inflation rates, we're talking about crippling around half of a whole generation economically, possibly for their entire lives. I'm already somewhat concerned that inequality and generational conflict could lead to widespread disorder within the next few years here at home, regardless of anything going on abroad. The effects of Brexit surely wouldn't help with that, but I don't believe any outcome in relation to Brexit (including completely stopping it) would fix these deep problems in our own society or their long term consequences either.