Looking like both kids are going to Bristol at the same time - how screwed am I?

[CottonOn]

Posting here for traffic.
Two kids, 13 months apart, both want to do aeronautical engineering, one girl starting this autumn, the second the next.

They’ll get the minimum maintenance loan. I’ve got roughly 20k set aside which I naively thought would give them a fairly pleasant 3 years. I’ve only just clocked that actually this isn’t nearly enough.

This is what the calculator is telling me

You could get a £4,767 Maintenance Loan to contribute towards your living costs.
How your Maintenance Loan is calculated:
£10,227 (the maximum Maintenance Loan available)

• £5,460 (the amount you might not be eligible for, based on your answers)

= £4,767 (the amount you could be eligible for, based on your answers)

I’m going to have to stump up £10,920 in the years where they are both there simultaneously just to get to the basic £10,227 and it ooks like accommodation is going to eat up 8k, so even that won’t be enough.

Can anyone tell me how much it’s realistically going to cost to top them up enough to live in Bristol? I’ve been so blithely naive all these years thinking I’d squirrelled enough away. Could kick myself.

Have you/they looked into trusts set up for further education? In my county there are some for people of certain religions, children of people of certain professions and those who live in specific areas. Also there are trusts encouraging people to go into STEM subjects, have a Google, here's one I found. https://raeng.org.uk/programmes-and-prizes/programmes/uk-grants-and-prizes/support-for-education/engineering-leaders-scholarship

My DS is in his first year and gets some maintenance loan (about 5k I think) but his halls take most of that up. He got a bursary (maybe £600 quid?) and his Dad sends him £100 a month but other than that he works. We can't afford to give him much but do the occasional food shop and got him set up with his room etc.

He worked the whole of the holidays between A levels and University and saved £4k.

We looked at him going to Brighton but he simply could not afford the accomodation it was totally stupid.

Just to say- how amazing, 2 super smart daughters studying engineering - well donr yo you! Goals!

@IsthisthereallifeIsthisjustfantasy how do we work out which ones are wealthier

@mrwalkensir

Sorry perhaps too nosey a question but I'm trying to figure out was your son offered maths at camebridge but not engineering so that's why he went elsewhere.

What is "larp"?

Apparently camebridge choirs are best in world?

I'm not sure I'm understanding what you mean by the means tested loan. Do you mean student finance? The living part of it? Or loans from a bank or building society? My daughter went to Brunel and qualified for London student finance, full amount, and had a loan from the bank to top up as I had no savings. She managed well on that without a job. This was 8 years ago, have things changed? As your daughters should be able to get bank loans plus any bursaries available, they need to speak to their uni advisor.

Where can you find out about these grants please?

There are only student loans now. No grants.

Hi Rollonsummer1. Maybe a bit of an odd one. He had no interest in Oxbridge - we have enough family members who went there. Fell completely in love with the university that he went to and was his first choice. The school persuaded him heavily to go for interview for engineering at Cambridge. I don't think he even prepped for it. The young interviewers thought he was excellent, the older that he was a bit too "out there". But his maths ability (including Olympiad) meant that they said "we'd take you for maths though if you want". To be fair to the school, I think they found it a breath of fresh air to not have parents pushing Oxbridge.

LARP is Live Action Role Play. He joined a "formal" choir first year at uni, but most members were a competitive lot. By the time they'd realised that he wasn't competing against them for post-grad music, he'd got fed up and focused on other choirs. To his embarrassment, at one point in his third year somebody referred to him as the "social centre" of the university. But he couldn't have spent so many hours on his course and so many others on LARP and music if he'd had a short Oxbridge term.

The OP's DC will only qualify for minimum student finance loan as they have clearly stated in their OP. That amount (approx £4.5k) is very unlikely to cover accommodation (even) at Bristol tho it would just about at some other unis.

If your DD qualified for the full loan then you would have been on a lower income. The full loan is enough with careful planning (ie a uni with cheaper accomm).

I would not really advise the OP's DDs to take out bank loans tbh - they would have to pay them back and with what?

Could they defer and get a gap year job?

Well yes, paying rent is difficult when you are starting out, but it is what most people do for a graduate job. In London, pretty much everyone starts out renting in shared houses, just like when they were students except sometimes a bit less grotty!

@Jojofjo44 - yeah, things have changed quite a lot. Families earning more than 25k household income have to contribute now. If your family earns over 60k you have to pay 5.5k per year per child, regardless of how many kids you have at uni. There are minor caveats, but that’s it in a nutshell.

https://www.ucas.com/sfe

Useful, up to date advice on here for those wondering how it works now and preparing ahead

Govt is looking to increase the maintenance loan too in recognition of col hike

Look at the size of their endowments on Wikipedia.

Semi-native here. Not only is Bristol expensive in terms of accommodation, but there has been insufficient accom available in the past couple of years, and some students have been "shipped out" to Newport. Look into GE Aviation Higher Apprenticeships. GE are based near Cheltenham, (Bishops Cleeve) and the course sends them to college to get an HND, and then to uni to get a full degree. They are paid whilst doing it all, and gaining experience in the workplace at the same time, and guaranteed a job at the end (so long as they don't stuff it up, lol)

@Jojofjo44 things have changed and the additional bank loans like the one your daughter took out (I can’t remember the exact name but something like career development loan) especially for the purpose of education and advancing your career were all phased out by the banks a few years ago so this wouldn’t be an option now in this scenario.