Things are looking up for students. A report from High Fliers, a graduate research company, has found that the number of graduate jobs being offered by the top 100 UK employers rose by 7.9% last year, and is expected to rise by about the same amount in 2015.

The amount graduates get paid is rising, too – for the first time in five years. Among those top 100 employers, the median starting salary has now reached £30,000pa. (Among employers generally, it is somewhere in the mid-to-high £20,000s.) There were even tales of investment banks offering graduates up to £50,000, and humble Aldi paying £42,000 – a nice wage packet for anybody, let alone a 21-year-old working at a budget supermarket. So, given the recent changes to student fees and loans, what will life for today’s graduates be like?

Well, universities can now charge up to £9,000 for tuition fees, although they get less money than before from the government. Whatever they charge, however, students can borrow it from the Student Loans Company. They can also borrow some more to live on while they study. Poorer students (plus a few clever ones) can get grants and bursaries, too, which are just gifts.

Indeed, as long as you never earn more than £21,000 in a financial year, the whole thing is a gift – ideal if you want to be a homemaker or a novelist. Once you cross that threshold, however, 9% of everything above it gets deducted from your payroll before tax. If you start on £25,000pa, for instance, you will pay back 9% of the top £4,000, which is £360pa, or £30/month. Whoever got that Aldi job at £42,000pa, will now be paying £157.50/month. At that rate, they would take a little more than 10 and a half years to pay off just the capital on the average 2014 leavers’ debt of £20,100. The 2014 leavers only had two years in which they could have been charged up to £9,000 in fees, of course. Next year’s graduates will owe more.But it’s complicated. Because the total debt will itself rise at a rate proportional to your earnings (up to a maximum of three points above inflation), and your earnings will almost certainly rise, too, as you get older and more senior. In short, as you earn more, your debt rises faster, but you also pay it off faster. However, and adding further complexity, the £21,000 repayment threshold will start to rise in 2017, in line with national average earnings. And any outstanding debts are cancelled after 30 years, so you may never pay some of the money back.

More jobs, and better-paid jobs, are good news for students – around 70% of whom are in paid work six months after graduation. The deal for the taxpayer is harder to assess. To be clear: student loans are only about half loans. A report from the business, innovation and skills committee last summer found that the government loses about 45p in every £1 it lends to students, with the majority expected never to pay the whole debt back.

Whether this is worth it depends which side of the coin you are looking at. Is it bad for graduates to be in debt for 30 years, or is it bad for the state because it means we get poor value for loans? Is it good that the state has committed so much money to students, or is it bad that there will be, according to the committee report, outstanding student debts of £330bn by 2044? I don’t know. Maybe there should be degrees in student finance.

• This article was amended on 15 January 2015 to clarify that it would take someone earning £42,000 10 and a half years to pay off just the capital on a student debt of £20,100. It would take longer to pay off the whole debt, with the interest added.