Cost of uni for parents

[TeenLifeMum]

I’ve read multiple threads on here about the cost of uni and parents supplementing about £800 per month. Is this your experience?

my question is really aimed at those who earn too much to qualify for anything above the minimum loan but aren’t crazy rich.

For context, I wonder if I need to plan for remortgaging or getting a loan to support all 3dc through. One will have one cross over year but the other two are twins so will be the same time. I don’t have a spare £2,400 per month available. Hoping for some real life experiences. (I do expect dc to have a pt job but wouldn’t expect lots of hours).

We're getting min loan and -following the mn line! - hoping student child will live off that while we pay accommodation. So I imagined that would be 6-7k a year. It turned out to be over 9. I'm using part of what we saved in the child trust fund/junior isa.

My son has saved a little towards his uni costs during 6th form and intends to work part time there. He has looked at a couple of universities and visited the type of employer he works for to check how realistically he could get work. He earns between £400 and £700 a month depending on if he does overtime.

He actually wants an apprentiship but realises these are incredibly rare.

He also has his child trust fund which we paid about £35 a month into and covers about £200 a month for 3 years. I appreciate we were very lucky to afford £35 a month and not need it for food.

Then the rest we would try our best to make up. We already pay for food so that is cost neutral plus we would no longer be saving £35.

We couldn't find the £705 a month out of our income and i think that figure suggested by PP, seems realistic.

We have a low income as a single parent family but we live in London so DD has been able to go to the best uni for her subject and still live at home. She got a loan and the max bursary of £5k a year. She works during holidays but not during term time as her study hours are long with a STEM degree. I can't pay towards anything but don't charge her rent or cost of food, bills etc. Second dc is 4 years younger, I'm very glad I won't have to face 3 at the same time but then I planned the gap to avoid simultaneous nursery fees.

Haven't read the thread

. The difficulty is that, for several cities, the maximum finance, or finance + parental contribution, goes nowhere near covering their costs. DS is fairly frugal, but in Bristol. Avoid Bristol like the plague. DD in Leeds had a much easier time.

This year, his final one, the only house they could get is £750 pm/pp excl billsx12 months. I'm a single mum on a medium non-management public sector salary. He has only been allocated £5500 this year. This therefore means even with the maximum parental contribution he would only have £125 total to live off for the year. So this year I've looked and can see he needs at minimum £8K on top of what he has been assessed. He does earn too but its his final year, he has ADHD and takes longer to focus. Fortunately his dad has just agreed to chip in £3k, and I will find hte other £5K, including from savings, but I wouldn't have been able to pay the £800 a month from my salary - it would be around a third of my after tax income.

My tactics were: to get both children to take years off before going, where they earned and saved. DS took an additional year off because of Covid impacts and that helped massively as no longer had both at university at the same time. DD did a placement year and saved and that helped too. Both have worked alongside studies in holidays and have saved. But it has been a major struggle as a single parent, even having saved several years beforehand, and I freelanced an additional day for 2 years to try to get more cash in. I feel resentful that this is all only assessed on the salary of the parent with custody, who anyway is needing a larger house and likely subsidising other more immediate costs they see, if they can.

The main issue is that maintenance loans haven't increased in line with the cost of accommodation. In 2021 we got the minimum loan for DC1 and it just about covered his accommodation. (Just over 4k) DC2 goes this year and the minimum loan doesn't come close to covering the accommodation (8k!!). We're having to find £600 a month for her.

both DC only got min maintenance loan. They used that to live off and we paid the rent which from memory was roughly 6k. The year we had to pay for both we had to borrow from my parents and pay it back the year after.

Like most people we made it up to the maximum loan amount. I don't see why my child should suffer because I have more money than other parents.
We also paid the phone contract and gym membership, travel expenses to and from university and costs associated with placements.
It did put back our retirement though and we had no overseas holidays in that time.

I couldn’t find how much the full maintenance loan is? My daughter has got 4750 I think which is more than I expected.

The difficulty is that, for several cities, the maximum finance, or finance + parental contribution, goes nowhere near covering their costs

This is often overlooked but so true - DD GF has same generous help/loan from Welsh government but her costs are so much higher so she has to work before and during and get help from her parents.

@Lana26 The maximum Maintenance Loan is £13,348 in England you only get that with income under £25,000

https://www.prospects.ac.uk/applying-for-university/student-loans-and-finance

Dumb question no doubt but why are the loans means tested? I thought they were at commercial interest rates so nothing to lose by allowing more people to borrow? Or is it because student debt is so high now that many won’t pay it off? The whole thing sounds like a total mess.

Edit to add: I’m a university lecturer with no kids but worried about the whole system 😬

Probably because a lot of people taking them never pay them back so the loans companies would lose more money if they loan more. I have a friend whose loan was just written off after a number of years.. She has never worked and never paid back one penny of it.

£100 a week spending money for just one person is very generous!

We pay for rent which is about £8k per year and our son lives on what would be the minimum loan amount, although he doesn't actually claim the loan.

We don't have a huge income but have paid approx 700 pcm for DC who went to a college that didn't qualify for student loan. It was reasonably doable as we don't have a lavish lifestyle or a huge mortgage and we had some savings. For DC2 we topped up £75 / month as she was getting almost full loan.
You should be able to save if your income is high enough for them not to qualify for more loan.
Also I believe the questionnaire does ask about other DC you are supporting so I presume that would be taken into account.

DC can work, especially in the holidays to supliment.

How much you pay out depends on the course as well. DD wanted to do Vet Nursing. We are in Scotland where her fees are paid, so she decided to stay at home and commute into uni and keep her part time job. We would just pay for her car and obviously the living expenses we just carried on paying as normal. We also had a small savings fund for her. She had to do 1800 hours in practice, unpaid, to qualify as well as passing practical exams. She was told the work experience would be done in three month blocks so she thought that would be easy enough to work around. In her second year, the RCVS decided that her work experience had to be done over the course of one year, in one go, so 40 hours minimum a week, plus 20 hours of studying. She had to let her part time job go, and we paid all costs. Her third year has cost us about £16,000 all in, as her car also died a death. We are self employed so that is £16,000 we had to find AFTER tax. Our savings are wiped out and I am very glad we do not have another child in further education. She passed her practical exams on Thursday and myself and her father nearly sobbed with relief! She only qualified for the minimum loan as we earn too much and bursaries do not go far. Vet students can't even get expenses paid for what they spend commuting in. As a PP said, we really should have done more research years ago and been better prepared. But she is qualified in her dream job now, so the pain has been worth it! It doesn't help that we have a cost of living crisis that didn't exist when she was accepted into uni. I don't know how people are covering soaring rents and part time, flexible jobs are thin on the ground. She applied at Morrisons, years ago, and they told her they would not employ a student for a weekend job as they wanted flexibility.

DH had a meltdown when he realised how much we have to contribute.

I got a full grant , dole and housing benefit in my day. My parents were pensioners.

I don’t know anyone who gives £800!

Mine get the minimum loan and then we give £350 a month in term time. We have to pay their rent over the summer as well (£560). We looked at the cheaper areas for universities as well-London would have been a whole different set of problems!

I have seen lots of posts from people on here over the years from people saying they don’t give their kids any money and they coped perfectly well (as if suggesting those of us who give their kids money for food are being indulgent), but then it emerges that their kids actually qualified for the maximum loan, so got double the money.

My ds has tried everything this summer to find work with no success.

It more than covered her costs but was less than she would have had if we were on a low income and she had a full maintenance loan. Fortunately her accommodation was fairly cheap and only a little more than the maintenance loan.

She has saved half of it which will be useful in later years when we have two simultaneously at uni and when she is only on an NHS bursary in her final year. This year her accommodation is more expensive so she will have less spending money.

DD tried from January (Gap year) and got nowhere.
Luckily she has had a small pet sitting business for a few years now and has a bit saved from that.

We're the same, not much in the way of spare cash after bills are paid and only two years before DS goes, if he does. He's looked at some local universities already and says he wouldn't want to move away but of course that can all change.

Are there cheaper accommodation places available these days? When I went you could apply to share a room in halls with one or two others, with very basic bathroom down the corridor shared with several rooms. Others opted for en suite rooms. But at least there was a choice if you needed to keep costs down.

They can also take a gap year before uni and work FT- living at home if they save basically all of that, even at NML then that will be a huge subsidy- It’s 15 months from leaving school to starting uni.

Also, encourage them to go north. There are exceptions but in general northern universities have lower living costs.

I went to Oxbridge so no term time work but I used to work 50-60 hour week in the holidays even in the days of grants as it didn’t cover enough - would do retail/ hospitality in the day and bar/ club at night. Couldn’t do that now but I had more stamina then!! I didn’t spend anything because I was working all the time so that was even better.

Rent is £585 a month, 11 months plus deposit. Then £50 a week, plus big shop at beginning of terms. We also pay for phones, subscription for music and tv. Plus the gym, medication and travel. X 2 for twins. Four year courses. Both at same uni and a more affordable one.