Unless we do something clever, creative and massive enough to change their minds, in 2015 the government will sell off all undergraduate student loan debt signed up for between 1998 and 2012. Conspicuously dubbed ‘Project Hero’, the plan was concocted by the Rothschild Group (yes, those key, knowledgeable stakeholders in higher education).

Rothschild’s report, quietly commissioned by the government, was commendable in its thoroughness, going so far as to provide ministers with a script they might use when selling the sale to students. “Your sister pays nine grand a year, so you are positively lucky to only face worsening terms. Thank us later,” they suggest.

Last week, as part of a wave of local and national 5th of November protests, Cambridge Defend Education held a demonstration on King’s Parade, playing a game of ‘Stuck in the Debt’ with passers-by and holding a ‘Debt-In’. But things can’t end there. Student politics has been stuck in a trough since the many actions and occupations in 2010 failed to stop the government in its fee-raising tracks.

In the loan sell-off we find an important rallying point for student activism, something we might materially be able to stop, something that should provoke wide ranging and meaningful discussion about what it is we want our universities to be for and how our relationship with them should be structured.

Debt is an abstract and difficult thing to contend with, especially when we spend so much of our energy trying not to think about it. It’s the great deferral of our time: sign now, get now, struggle later. Coalition rhetoric’s safe house is “the mess left by our predecessors”, the naivety of persistent borrowing. Yet for most students, this is the only means by which we can access higher education. We sign up, or we lose out: but now we seem to be pushed into both.

The sale of loan agreements to a private, unaccountable (add to that, possibly and probably irrelevant and uncaring) corporation could lead to a hike in interest rates, faster rates of repayment and a drop in the minimum salary threshold. Willetts has assured the NUS that he will mitigate against such side effects, but haven’t we heard similar promises before? Are we going to fall for false consolations again?

Alex Hern of the New Statesman asserts that the move is “politically driven economic illiteracy.” And he’s right. This is a profoundly ideological step, and part of a much deeper marketisation agenda. Laying aside the contentious issue of shifting the HE funding burden onto students who increasingly get far less contact time and see far more departments close, it is difficult to see financial sense here. Right now, when we repay loans, the interest goes back into the public purse; soon it will benefit the new landlords of our education. They could be anyone, they could do anything with our money.

They will buy the debt outright for a much smaller amount of money than the government would receive in the long term. Add to that Willetts’s ‘sweetener’, the proposed ‘synthetic hedge’. This allows the government to reappropriate more public money: ‘Dear Big Business, please keep interest rates low for those pesky students; here’s a big bag of money to make you feel better about that. Yours, The Government.’

This is a simple case of a government reneging on its social and economic responsibility. Where next? Right now, if I leave university and don’t find a good job then I don’t start repaying my loan, so there’s a financial imperative for the government to invest in graduate work. In a jobs crisis, after selling off my debt, the government has even less impetus to help me find work. Am I to rely on a market that values my arts degree? On a government who might invest simply because it’s the right thing to do? No, I didn’t think so.

As with the sale of Royal Mail, we hear that in ‘times like these’ we shouldn’t be ‘compulsively hoarding’ public services. A claim which misunderstands the relationship between public good and public services.

These institutions are tools we create to help ourselves, they are ours. It is fiscal idiocy to sell the loan book, even if it does bag the desired ten billion. But more than that, it is dangerously placing aspects of our society we depend on most for progress in the hands of those whose prime concern is profit.

In the age of austerity the idea that profit might come before people seems an idealistic cliché. We’ve seen the banner, we’ve heard the chants, now go back to work. But it is absolutely central that we don’t lose sight of this priority. Education is for people, for learning, not for Rothschild.

We need a national body that represents student interests effectively. We need a discussion that unites the sale of student debt with a housing crisis, a removal of access to state funded lawyers, the need for patients to pay for medicine the NHS deems too expensive.

Enough is enough. The sale calls for imminent, intelligent, inclusive mobilisation.