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.

Much maligned but zero hours contracts can work well for students.

Also doing deliveries for Uber eats/deliveroo and the like as you can sign in at the most lucrative times and pick and choose which orders to pick up. Handy if doing it by bicycle.

Ds is doing engineering, mechanical though

He works two evenings whilst away and picks up the job he had in A levels when back

He’s pretty good, he’s also been lucky

On the type of job it’s a nice bistro and restaurant here, bonus is the food he gets

I have one DD going in September and am working on basis of £40k (minimum) for a 4 year degree. Youngest will go (if he wants to) when eldest is in final year so potentially £80k to put both through a degree.
I will support them somehow but in reality I am in a management position with members of my team earning not much less than me having never been to uni. I do question the value some days.

I left Uni 6 years ago now but I received the minimum loan, my parents paid my rent and I lived off the loan I was expected to choose the cheapest halls option (shared bathrooms) and I found housemates who where also on a budget so we where organised and confirmed our second and 3rd year accommodation early to get something cheap but bearable.
I worked for the university during term time which wasn't much but helped fund me a bit and then I worked full time during the summer holidays to save money for the next year. I also had a Saturday Job for the two years of 6th form and saved quite a bit from that so I went with a bit of a buffer.
For my masters degree the load was eaten almost entirely by tuition, again my parents paid my rent but couldn't afford to give me anything to live on. I used the 2k remaining of the loan very wisely while finding work and worked a minimum of 3 days a week throughout the entire degree, more during holidays to fund myself.
It was a lot of work but 100% doable and a lot of students are in the same boat!

@CottonOn
Make sure they request the cheapest hall accommodation.
DD2 wanted an en-suite room but had allocated shared bathroom accommodation which she didn't mind once she got there. It was £2100 a year cheaper than the newer en-suite rooms.
Luckily I received an inheritance as she started uni in September 2019 and I was furloughed throughout covid and DH had cancer treatment at that time and it was too risky to work whilst having chemo.

Just want to add that aero is a pretty brutal course - part-time work during the week isn't very doable. We were lucky that the two of ours who did engineering were Warwick and Bristol, so rents were lower. And the pay afterwards is good.

Would add that youngest and his female aero coursemate are now both working in that field in Bristol.

The holiday between finishing exams and uni starting is really long. One of mine did some sort of data job entry via an agency and got over £500 a week and this was a few years ago. It was boring but she went to uni with a good few thousand pounds. My girls also saved a lot by doing babysitting. They did it from age 15'ish and saved a lot of money. My boys didn't save as much but were happier to live in grotty flats.
I technically had 4 kids at uni at the same time but one was doing a funded PhD so had his own money.

I was a,a ed at how cheaply they could live. They had some very skint friends who were able to live even more cheaply. Accommodation seems to have gone up a lot though 🫤

Bristol is a very expensive place to be; second only to London in terms of rent, going out etc.

Bristol is expensive. A student house share on the edge of Clifton is £7500 this academic year. Plus bills. It just is. No point in comparing with other parts of the country.

I lived in Horfield when I was at Bristol. It's a further away from the centre but only about a half-hour walk to the uni and you get much more for your money. It's also handy if one is at the university of Bristol and the other at UWE. I know rents and house costs have gone through the roof since I was first there though.

My relative moved to an expensive city to study; she has just graduated. She did receive the maximum loan due to no parental support. But this only covered most but not all of her rent.
She obtained a supermarket job when she started her A levels, not many fixed hours but loads over overtime so she worked about 20 hours pw term time and full time in the hols. She was then able to transfer her post to her uni city (which is why she’d only applied for national companies) and continued to work. She remained in her uni city in the holidays because she had to pay the rent anyway and it enabled her to continue to work FT. Granted, she had a study late at night often but the young have lots of energy, she was fine. She left uni with no debt other than her student loan, so it is doable.

When I was at uni lots of MEng and BEng students were on internships/scholarships with GEC Marconi and the MOD? (Am sure there are other industry players); they pretty much ‘earned’ £10k a year, but had work placements with them every summer and in the y3 ‘year out/work placement’, during which they found a project for their final year that was of benefit to the company?

re aeronautical engineering - my uncle was sponsored by the RAF to do his degree (might not be what you want, but worth investigating) and he was debt free in his late 20’s, did go on to actually work for BAE but got to get married in RAF dress uniform after serving as a flight navigator in the RAF.

The RAF might be able to offer some help if they sign up for something? Just a thought and it may not be their kind of thing.

The whole system is wrong. Why should someone’s life chances/chance of a place at University be based on their parents’ ability to make a contribution. Can they say that they’re estranged from you in order to get the maximum support?

Sorry if this has been said already, but be aware that engineering is a tough course and they won’t have a lot of time for paid work during the term. My son is doing the general engineering course at Sheffield Uni and has around 30 taught hours per week, plus an expectation of at least the same again in additional work. He does paid work during the holidays but he is very very busy with his degree during term time. It’s a different world to, say, a drama or philosophy degree, which is what his flatmates are doing.

Another option for jobs that might suit depending on personality are breakfast/afterschool/holiday clubs for primary school kids Lots of them in Bristol and they are constantly looking for students to hire because the hours fit well with uni hours.

You have to prove total financial and residential independence for several years - I think 5.

Do most people know how much the parental contribution is? I feel like I missed a memo

Get them to search through the online lists of scholarships and bursaries. Many of these are not so well known and not many people apply for them. They are often also very niche for things like female descendents of bakers wives widowed in ww1 in x parish. You might find they meet requirements for a few- some are cash and some are for specific item requests (laptop, books, field trip etc.) Some are for academic excellence in particular subjects. I did quite well out of these at university.

For the engineering, I have a relative who was sponsored throughout by one of the big companies and enjoyed internships, work shadowing, special trips and walked in to an excellent job on graduation. Even paid for their private pilots license.

Btw there is an FB page called WIWIKAU where students and parents post like this - lots of parents/fellow students there can give you specific advice about Bristol and how they managed similar timing issues? Will be in the same boat - mine are 3 years apart, but one has had health issues so is now going 2 years later and wants to do a 4 year course, whilst the other is hoping to do medicine. 🤯

Accommodation could be easily £8k a year in Bristol. It is incredibly expensive, even in a house share. I grew up in Bristol but went to uni in Wales because of the cost there. Still in Wales many years later. Bristol prices are insane.

Can they do a year abroad within their course? Might be cheaper year than Bristol. Get them both to sign up to IET Institute of Engineers and Technology. At one stage they had generous grants for study abroad but you must apply a long time in advance. Also suggest to them they can do internships during the summer months and earn reasonably.

My son is at Bristol in an 8 bed house share. Rent for this year was £8700 plus bills. Fairly standard for Bristol house share rentals.

Halls ranged from around £7 to 11k this year I think for Bristol.

Hi Spirallingdownwards are you able to share how much he needs in total each year?