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.

It was the same when I was at uni 10 yrs ago, and is the main reason I had to quit uni, though granted Uni costs have gone up considerably more since then.
Due to DM's and DSD's earnings I got the lowest student loan amount but I couldn't turn to DM for much financial help as she had my 4 younger siblings at home, the youngest being only 9 months old and a complete surprise as DM was on the pill, so she didn't have any spare money to help out.
My loan didn't cover uni accommodation costs but I got a job to pay the extra toward accommodation and for food and phone bill etc., but I soon came to the point where I found myself having to put work before uni and by 2nd year I was failing because I couldn't afford not to take the hours at work so I could pay bills, when really I should have been in lectures or working on uni projects.
It's sad that it happens this way, but it is what it is. My younger DSis has actually found uni life much more financially easier because she had moved in with her dad at 17, so when she went to uni, her loan was based on the fact he doesn't earn and receivers DLA instead. This meant she got a large grant instead of a loan for her first year, and the other years she has been given the highest loan amount for living costs, so she has been able to stick to just her 10 hours p/w work, unlike the 35+ I had to work.

When we went to Exeter for a look see, the parents were taken off to sit through a finance presentation. It was made very clear that parents are now expected to have financial responsibility for their kids until they are 24, and that top ups were expected.

The same was said at Plymouth and RHUL where ds eventually went.

DS paid £85 I in halls two years ago. Not ensuite of course but perfectly nice and all bills were included other than food.

His current private rental is slightly cheaper- again all bills included.

Good university north west England.

DD would never want to share a room at university.

Titchy but it hasn’t
In the 70s tuition was free, and you got accommodation and food...my parents gave me £12 a month because my dad’s modest income was too high for me to get an independent allowance.

DD would never want to share a room at university.

Which is why comparisons with past prices are unhelpful. A lot of university accommodation in the past was shared. My daughter shared in her first year a couple of years ago: much cheaper. Parents now pitch up at open days and expect that their children get an en suite single room. Then on MN accuse universities of profiteering because costs have risen faster than inflation. How many en suite single rooms were there in halls in the 1980s?

the 70s tuition was free, and you got accommodation and food...

In general, no you didn’t, unless you were at Oxford or Cambridge (or maybe Durham). Where you can still go through entirely in catered halls (my elder lived in college at OXford for the whole three years a couple of years ago). Most universities did not have accommodation for all their students, and of the accommodation they had a lot of it was self-catering, by the 1970s. There is a massive amount of rose tinted recollection in these sorts of threads.

I went to teacher training college
Are you saying that in the 70s university students were treated differently to we would be teachers
Because if so I was totally unaware of that and in that case I apologise I’m comparing apples with pears
If that was the case...that was very unfair.

It was made very clear that parents are now expected to have financial responsibility for their kids until they are 24, and that top ups were expected.

Of course they do. That's because they are trying to sell you something. Do you really expect them to say, now some of you might want to rethink applying to study here because it's very expensive and you won't be able to afford it?

No, they make out that it's perfectly affordable if the parents pitch in.

Teacher training colleges were sometimes residential. Some weren’t, but because of the massive requirement for teachers caused by the raising of school leaving age and the baby boom there had been a large number of “emergency teacher training colleges” built after the war. Many of those were residential because they were on old military bases; for example, what is now Worcester University was an old RAF base which became a teacher training college.

“Old” universities were residential.

But post-war plate glass universities all had significant amounts of self-catering, and by the 1970s most universities apart from the old ones were spreading into the surrounding housing stock. I doubt that the big redbricks ever had enough accommodation to handle all their students, and they certainly never had enough catered accommodation (nor did the students want catered, anyway).

There's a common narrative that UK universities are rolling in money from home and EU students. They aren't.

York university accounts.

£18million surplus
£82million in the bank
Net assets of £400million

No, not rolling in it at all!

My DS is taking a year out and saving £500/month towards university. We will help where we can but only to probably a maximum of £200 a month. Hopefully he'll be able to go back to his job during the holidays

I shared a room when I first went to university back in the early 90's. Then I remember our shared flat cost £35/week each

This is why young people are stressed and uptight! Doesn't help when people call them snowflakes etc.

Your eyes appear to have skipped entirely over “from home and EU students”. A look at York’s report shows that teaching income is about half of its total income, and that about 15% of its students are non-EU fee status (who will be paying between two and three times what a UK student pays). If you have inside knowledge of how much of that £18m surplus comes out of home/EU fees please share it, but my prediction is that it will be “almost none”. A surplus of £18m is 5% of their £367m turnover, and that will come from margin on funded research and from overseas teaching, particularly PGT (mostly MScs). I’d be surprised if they’re making remotely close to £1m profit on student accommodation. Unless York are a real outlier amongst university of their type, the difference between deficit and surplus will be a couple of thousand Chinese MSc students.

The assets will mostly be the land and buildings, by the way, so I’m not at all clear what point you’re making. Yes, they could close the university and sell the land for housing, I guess.

fairenuff We already knew that Exeter was expensive as it's one of our local universities in the UK. They didn't sell themselves to any of us, neither Exeter, Exeter, nor Exeter Penryn, so they were off the list.

We put ds through without loans, as we thought we would probably be able to at the time he applied, but it was interesting to hear from all three universities, including Plymouth, which is cheaper than Exeter for living costs, that a parental contribution was expected.

I think the loans should all be the same for maintenance; if a student is considered mature enough to sign up for that sort of debt, then parental income shouldn't be taken into account any more than it is for the tuition loan.

But all the universities are selling their places. They want parents to buy in.

In the 70s tuition was free, and you got accommodation and food

Tuition was free - but even though it isn't now, access to the tuition fee loan doesn't depend on household income.

What do you mean you got accommodation and food? If your parents earned too much you got fuck all grant for accommodation and food.

@Badbadbunny York has a huge number of international students, a quick look suggests they are paying somewhere between £17,000 and £21,000 a year. If you dig further into their accounts, they had an income of £48 million from international students - who are very profitable at those fees!

Universities who are less prestigious than York don't get the international student numbers and can't charge as high fees for the ones they do get - and some of them are really struggling.

Sheffield has loads of Chinese students.

@titchy, the poster you’re responding to said they went to a teacher training college, so did a CertEd, probably two years in the 1970s, possibly three years.

It was a different world to university funding, and although I am interested in the history of student and university funding I don’t know the details. If anyone does, please chime in. I think I’m right in saying that it was mostly fully funded, independent of parental income (similarly to nursing training) but I could be wrong.

But it’s not relevant to discussions about university funding, because they weren’t universities. A lot of the teacher training colleges were merged into polytechnics in the 1970s and 1980s, but a lot weren’t.

Reflectent. 1999 DS cost £60 per week was for newly built halls with en suite facilities not shared. 2002 DS2 £70 en suite not shared was the same. So I feel it can be useful to look back at costs.

fairenuff I didn't get the feeling from Plymouth or RHUL that it was about 'selling' to parents, but more concern that they had seen the difficulties some students had had with finances.

I have to say that Exeter were very precise with how much they thought a parental contribution would be. Some parents looked quite startled at the amount.

they had an income of £48 million from international students - who are very profitable at those fees!

And whose fees subsidise the home students! Remove international students from most research intensive universities and they'll fold.

My parents never gave me a penny yet I got a reduced maintenance. Not new.