The Treasury Select Committee has delivered a devastating verdict. It says the Government mis-sold around £200 billion of student loans to more than five million young people by failing to explain that interest rates could rise and repayment thresholds could be frozen after they had signed up.

If compensation follows, it would eclipse every previous financial mis-selling scandal. PPI cost the banks around £50 billion. The car finance scandal is expected to cost about £7.5 billion. A £200 billion student loan scandal is on another level entirely.

But I don’t think the loans are the biggest scandal.

The real mis-selling happened years earlier.

For more than two decades, millions of teenagers were sold a simple promise: go to university, get a degree, and you’ll enjoy a better career and a better life. It became political dogma, particularly after Tony Blair’s ambition for half of all young people to attend university. Schools promoted it, careers advisers repeated it, and universities enthusiastically embraced it.

The result? An entire generation burdened with debts of tens of thousands of pounds, many now working in jobs that never required a degree in the first place.

Of course, degrees in medicine, engineering, nursing, law and other professional disciplines remain outstanding investments. But can the same honestly be said of every degree now on offer? Clearly not.

Universities are no longer simply centres of learning. They are businesses competing for customers. More students mean more income. Empty seats mean less money. Yet when a business sells a product costing tens of thousands of pounds, financed almost entirely by taxpayer-backed loans, it should be expected to prove its claims.

Instead, too many young people were sold aspiration without enough honesty about likely outcomes.

Government cannot escape responsibility either. It created the loans, promoted the system, encouraged participation and then changed the repayment rules after students had signed. It wasn’t just the lender, it was one of the salespeople.

If the Treasury Committee is right that students were misled about the loans, then the far bigger question is this: who mis-sold the degrees?

The loans were merely the finance. The real product was the promise that almost any degree was a ticket to prosperity.

That was the biggest lie of all.