With an election manifesto heaving with pledges and a kitty insufficient to fulfil them, last week’s Scottish budget represented the biggest shunt to the Scottish Nationalist bandwagon during their brief tenure in government. Almost unsurprisingly—although less so than the discovery that the Scottish Government had promised far more than it can deliver—the group to come away most disappointed with the budget announcement are Scotland’s students.

Having campaigned on a platform of “dumping student debt,” and promising to pay of the £1.9bn debt owed collectively by Scottish students and graduates to the Student Loans Company, the SNP has grossly breached the trust of the future generation of business and society leaders. But it is a breach of trust unlikely to harm them.

Part of the reason why students have been worst hit in this budget, and part of the reason why student conditions have steadily dropped since the withdrawal of grants and the introduction of top up fees, is that there is no grassroots political organisation of any note at all.

It would be lazy to blame this on apathy, at least in its most traditional of interpretations. Students are among the most politically active in society with regards to single issue causes such as tackling climate change, equality and human rights. However, when it comes to engagement with the political establishment and, with it, access to power, students are hugely under-represented. An illustration can be taken from the city of Edinburgh and the Council’s decision to impose housing quotas on certain areas, limiting the accommodation options of future generations of students. Given that students as a group constitute over 10% of the city’s population, a coherent and organised campaign would have destroyed this proposal at the planning stage, but there was no storming of the Bastille, no rioting in the streets, barely any angry letters at all.

The reason for this? Students are the least self-interested group, politically speaking, active in the UK today. Such is the case because current students are unlikely to ever be affected by new legislation or policy: they will long be graduated by the time they come into force. Students are not a coherent group, because they will not be students for long, their identities as students are exceptionally short-term compared to almost any other group and the state of academia in five years time is something that today’s student will pay little attention to.

Rather it is the succeeding generation, those children entering their teens, with almost no political consciousness, that will bear the brunt of any changes—or in this case broken promises—made to the system. In effect, the very idea of students existing as a political demographic is a myth and that, perhaps more than any other contributing factor, is why academic pursuit has become increasingly difficult and expensive for Britain’s young.

If we are to protect our educational future, and with it the strength of our economy and society, then society as a whole needs to take a vested interest in the well-being of the future, not just the current, generation of students. When we vote for a government that makes promises such as the SNP made in May, we must make sure that these promises are kept. We must not allow these promises to be broken and there must be public outrage when they are among the first to be dropped. But importantly, we must acknowledge that students will not safeguard their successors because they have less invested in them than any other group. Rather businesses, universities, parents and schools must carry the mantle and ensure that the next generation are not so comparatively less well off as we are vis-à-vis our predecessors.