How can this be right? It isn’t . Martin Lewis on uni costs.

[Dowser]

Watched Martin Lewis tonight as grandson is off to uni in two years.

So...it’s £9000 a year tuition
Then the highest living allowance is presently £8700 per annum

So...if your parents earn over £25k , your maintenance loan is reduced.
Some parents didn’t realise that they were expected to top up to the full amount
One poor lad was attempting to live on £4K . His parents hadn’t realised they were meant to top up

Then there was a young girl who had to leave uni because her mum got a new partner. The students loan went down from full to low and this guy who wasn’t her father, had only been with the mum was expected to pay for someone else’s child. I think there was a shortfall of £5k

Martin Lewis rang up the student loan company and was told it was correct.

He’s looking into it.
I was shocked at that.

**Struggled a lot with anxiety because I didn't make many friends as I couldnt afford to go on nights out, cinema, ski trips, weekend trips to surrounding cities etc. It was very very hard and actually out of the three years I only actually enjoyed my second year, the rest was bloody miserable.

It’s been just over 20 years since I was at uni however there were no holidays/ski trips or visits to other cities.

I spent every holiday working in a nursing home 12 hrs a day, 3-4 days a week to top up my student loan. This was pre fees however I had no help from parents to pay living costs. My DH went to uni in NI from Rep of Ireland. He had little money to live on and worked his backside off to come 2nd in his engineering year and then to do PhD. He didn’t go out socialising, he was there to work.

It could get worse down the road for ex students.

Government begins plans to sell off billions of pounds worth of student debt to private companies

www.independent.co.uk/student/news/student-loans-sales-debt-private-companies-treasury-graduates-12bn-a7565716.html

Obviously it is not fair for new partners, etc to affect entitlement but I do think there should be a means tested element. Why should a family struggling on minimum wage fund the children of the wealthy?

Simply because you can’t compete compel a parent to give their child money. It doesn’t matter how much your parents earn if they don’t give you any of it.

I hope to god it doesn’t cost £5k for what...about 30 weeks

the problem is that no-one leases for 30 weeks, it's usually 40 (or in some cases 50). For my DS2 it's looking like £4.5k for some pretty grotty looking shared uni halls (he's pretty grotty though so will fit right in!) It might be cheaper 2nd year onwards in private shared flat but who knows. I'd prefer him in the security of halls for the first year when he is hundreds of miles away.

It is possible to prove you are estranged from your parents in order to get the full loan. DD has a friend whose parents refused to fill in the forms or pay anything towards uni costs (won't even allow them to go home for the holidays). That friend somehow proved an estrangement and is in receipt of the maximum loan, and has a weekend job to help as well.

My adult kids at university are pretty independent. What's so laughable about that?

The cost of uni accommodation is often more than private rent, so costs could go down from 2nd year. This depends where the uni is. My daughter is at uni in South so her private rent is the same as her uni halls (£520 a month private rent unfurnished) . Private rent can need to be paid for 52 weeks where as uni I think is 34 weeks. Uni halls usually include all bills, where as private rentals often don't.My sons went to uni in the north and their private rent was around £350 a month. This doesn't include deposits etc

3 years ago DD's halls were over £6000 for the year, I think DS1s were just under. I think we had to pay for 42 weeks in spite of them being there much less than that. Cheaper second year, although of course you have to pay for 52 weeks then.

This thread scares me I can barely afford school trips let alone helping with another rent or three in my case.

I never went to uni so have no idea how anything works my parents never helped me with anything money wise I even had to find my own train fares to college at 17 as they didn't believe in pocket money.

Good lord 😱
I’m glad I raised the topic .
It’s been a real eye opener for me.
When I went to college , there were no fees and accommodation and food were all provided in the halls.
I didn’t get a grant and my parents gave me £3 a week !
I don’t think I was badly done to at all compared to today’s students.

It’s horrifying.

@dowser DS currently pays £6700 for a little room in halls in the midlands.

Next year will be cheaper.

DD is at a different uni, 3rd year private rent is £420 a month. For 11 and a half months, even though she'll be finished in June, it runs until September. Her first year in halls was £6200.

Both get minimum loans which barely cover half of it.

They also don’t take into consideration other dependants. Me and brother were both at uni but they treated us separately and didn’t split the parental amount accordingly between us. I had three jobs as my parents couldn’t help us.

I have just priced up what I think DD's halls will cost, and it will be £5373.20 for 40 weeks. Her maintenance loan will cover this, but we will have to top that up because she will need to eat and buy books.

Yes, it's definitely getting worse for students.

When my dad went he had no fees and got a full grant for living costs. He had a slightly frugal lifestyle but his parents didn't pay a penny.

By the time I went I paid fees but they were means tested so I paid £1000 per year. I also got a loan rather than a grant, and had to be pretty frugal but still managed to run up my overdraft and credit card (I couldn't work at the same time as I had dd1 by then). My parents were expected to contribute the £1000 a year fees but no living costs.It's now 15 years since I finished uni and I am almost finished paying off my loan.

Now DD is at uni. She pays fees of over £9000, through her student loan, and gets a loan of about £5500 for her living costs, which I am expected to top up to the maximum. She's chosen a 4 year course, so by the end of uni she will have £58000 of debt. How will she ever pay that off? She probably never will. I will also have contributed nearly £20000 towards her university education. I hope it's worth it.

It's not as awful as it sounds but it does pay to plan ahead. Both my dcs worked part time during the A level years (and earlier) and managed to save loads. Especially over the summer holidays. And they have jobs in their uni towns too so they seem to manage ok. I don't give them money.

University terms are really short too so they get loads of time off over the summer. DS had a job at a warehouse earning £10 an hour so he was raking it in.

My DP and I are facing this dilemma with my DD (DP is not her Dad) who is due to go to Uni this year.

All through her secondary education DP and I were on minimum wage jobs having been made redundant from the public sector.
So, no opportunity to save and we accrued debts in that time in order to keep the house.

18 months ago, DP and I both secured much better jobs - he works away Mon-Thurs, but we are still better off than we were on min wage, and we've been paying off debts, paying for things we've desperately needed to do like roof repairs and squirrelled away as much as we can for DD - but in reality its not anything close to what she'll need.

We will, quite rightly, be assessed on our current household income for her student loan, and she will get a minimal maintenance loan - somehow, we've got to find the money to support her when we've had absolutely no chance of saving for her all the while she was studying her GCSEs.

DD's course will have 30 contact hours a week, plus loads of self study. She is under the CFS team so she will struggle to keep on top of that. I will encourage her to work in the holidays only.

Dowser A lot of the halls are now private accommodation - they have been privatised at many universities.
Even where they haven't, the costs are still high.
Both my dc's rent was higher than their loan.

However, as has been explained previously, you have to stop thinking of it as an ordinary 'loan' or a debt. They way it gets paid back (if it gets paid back) works like a tax. You only make payments when you are earning enough. the payments don't change, however big the amount borrowed is - they change when your salary changes.

can't I'm not finding the top ups as bad as I thought we would.

For my DD the maintenance loan almost covered her rent in halls. I think we have to contribute about £100 per term towards the rent. Then we give an allowance weekly of £80. That goes on food, books, bus pass, entertainment. I thought that £80 a week would make a huge dent in our budget, but it's surprisingly ok. By the time I'd been paying for school dinners £15 a week, bus pass £12 a week, driving lessons £24 a week (until she passed her test a few months before a levels), and her food. I don't think she's actually costing me a lot more being away than she was when she was here. The savings of her not being here are almost as much as I'm giving her to be there. Obviously if your child has been on a tighter budget as a teenager then you won't make as much savings, but it's really surprising how much the food bill goes down when they move out!!

And obviously if you are on a lower income you need to contribute less. So most of the other students DD knows are getting more as a loan and less from their parents.

Our DS gets minimum maintenance loan from Scottish Governemnt which is (if I remember correctly) £4300. He is studying in England so he’s not eligible for the Scottish Free Tuition Fees therefore he has the £9250 a year student loan. His halls rent for his first year is £5800 so the maintenance loan doesn’t cover it. His father and I pay the £5800 for his accommodation so he can use the maintenance loan to live on, buy books etc. He is lucky we can support him like this and I wish we could pay more so he wouldnt have the maintenance loan hanging around his neck in the future. Thankfully, for us, he will be finished uni by the time his sister starts.

Back in the mid 70s I left school at 16. Over the last few years we have paid out a fortune to help our children with university. In the long run it will hopefully be money well spent for the kids. Yet it leaves us uncertain about own retirement planning, which has been neglected in order to cough up for their education.

With hindsight I would advise parents of teenagers to look into the real costs of university vs well paid job opportunities and try to go into this fully informed. It is often those in the squeezed middle who find the financial contributions hardest to make. In many cases it would be better for kids to leave school and work, then go to uni later, when they can prove independence and get full maintenance loans.

Another advantage of this is that the young people may have a better idea of what they want to do in life. One of ours did business studies and history at uni, had a great student life with loads of debt, got a 2:1. He ended up working in call centres for banks and an insurance company, then progressed at work in their legal team before finding that he was drawn to law and advised he had the right qualities for this. He learnt a lot more from working than he did from his first degree and most of the people he worked alongside hadn't been to uni. So back to uni, lots more funding from the bank of mum and dad, plus this time round real hard work on his part. He has achieved his dream career and is doing extremely well in law.

DD has just completed a nursing degree, starts next week in her new A&E staff nurse job. After leaving school she did dance/theatre studies at FE College. Her school careers advisers thought this was a great choice, but not grounded in the real world at all. She then became a hairdresser, once it turned out there were few jobs available in the theatre. (We tried to tell her at the outset). Working part-time as a carer for extra cash, she found healthcare seemed a good option, not at all glamorous but plenty of jobs available.

JC4PMPLZ Some kids should not be going on to do degrees, as they can't cope with A levels, and their grades reflect this.

Having just finished putting ds through 4 years of university (BA and then MA), I can confirm that Hall costs are huge, especially post grad halls.

Living is out is better value. DS pays about 145 per week for self catering and next year will share a house with three others and pay 98 for his share. He will have utility costs in top of the 98, but given the ridiculous amount he pays to do his laundry at university, will still be better off and have better facilities - nicer kitchen etc.
The maintenance loan makes no sense - IMO. Based on household income, but parents have no legal obligation to top up the amount .