SO, according to my boomer mum, sending a child through uni these days is the same as it was in the 90s

[PotteringAboutIn]

Because apparently they didn't have the wages back then

Ffs
Drives me nuts

What when uni was free, accommodation wasn't anywhere near as expensive and you even got a grant

I went to uni 1992-1995 and it cost me £27 a week and i think that included bills too but can't quite remember. Used to go next door on a Friday evening to the corner shop - the landlord ran the corner shop too - and get out our cheque books :)

I had a full grant for 3 years but i also had a maintenance loan of i think £1000 a year which had to be paid back. I think the grant was about £700 a month for the first term but the following two terms were less.

I had no family support and was in my overdraft constantly, despite getting the grant, it wasn't really enough to live on, i was careful with my money too.

she turned 80 in Jan this year

(I’m not a boomer but) I hate ageist slurs.

it’s my way of expressing that ageism
is ignorance.

When I went to university in 1975, my grant covered my accommodation ( just about) with a little left over for living costs. As my older sister was also at university I got a full grant, dad was on average wage I guess, mum did not work and there were four children in total. It was tight for me and I had to work in the holidays to save up but my parents helped a little by buying me some food and paying for my train fares home. It was not very common for families like mine to have children at university but my parents were very aspirational for us, only 6 of us from my sixth form of 50 actually went on to further education. But they were the first of their families to own a house rather than rent so definitely not usual in inner city Manchester.

By the time my children went to university in 2004 ish, they got a loan for living costs but it was just before tuition fees came in. The loan was based solely on my income as I was divorced, it did not take into account the child maintenance my ex still gave me, I managed to get him to agree to continue paying it until they finished university! So my children only needed to take out the basic loan, I used child maintenance to pay their accommodation so I reckon they had a very good deal.

It is definitely more expensive nowadays to go to university and parents to seem to contribute a lot, my nephew is currently in his second year and my sister pays for his accommodation but he will still end up with huge loans to repay. His sister refused to go purely because of the cost and did a degree level apprenticeship and is currently earning a lot more than her friends who finished university a couple of years ago.

Then she's not a Boomer.

Silly comparison really. As university for someone in grant days was vastly different to today.
Fewer people ever went to university. And many did not get the full grant. And the parental contribution was not always possible for parents to give. Students then were often very poor in a different way. People did gap years to earn money before going, not for a holiday travelling.

These days everyone goes. And gets a debt which they pay off bit by bit.

Tony Blair made it so every parent wanted to believe their child was capable and able enough to go to university. Who wants to have the child that doesn’t. As a result young people were told they worked harder, were more intelligent than the year before. Until everyone realised this talk had to stop as it was ludicrous. It also produced young people who expected to do a junior level job ‘for a bit’ only. And to be at the top table fast in any organisation. That expectation for them was very unfair.

As Tony Blair gave universities plenty of money via student loans the central government support for educating our young people diminished.
Universities became businesses. And started to look abroad to support their interests. The overseas student became more lucrative than our own. So they advertise abroad.

Primarily universities were set up to educate the brightest of British young people. And some from elsewhere. Not the other way around.

She's not a boomer. She's from the Silent Generation.
Boomers are currently between 62 and 80 years old.

@luckylavender Im no where near 60 and i have to agree with you both.

I do look at the salaries
i started on 13.5K for a 100 hr week a one bed room flat was 100K in London where I wanted to live and could not afford. i was a british student who paid international fees for 3 yrs of my course - courtesy of a father whose job was overseas but by the time I went to university was medically disabled - 34k debt in an era of mean 9% interest rates on my bank loan!

The equivalent is 45k for a 40 hr week and the same one bedroom flat recently sold for 260k with 70k debt on a stupid interest rate.

different generations have different challenges but to say it is harder now across the board is far too simplistic.

You have edited since I started writing, and I'm not sure how to find the original post, which I pressed quote on, but here goes...
Not sure who you think you're responding to, but obviously (from the quote history (which I now realise can't be trusted)) I didn't suggest your mum was spending 4k a month on childcare. If she'd been chairman of ICI she might have earned that much, but no.

It is not clear when your mum was talking about - as another poster pointed out, the baby boomer years were 1946-64, and she could have been anything from perhaps 16 to 35 when she had you. You also didn't say how many nursery places you are paying for.
What I wrote was appropriate for my preschool years and my children's preschool years in the south of England. Even the part time (2.5 hours a day for age 3+) wasn't built till 1980, and many times oversubscribed as the only one for miles. There was also a huge social price to pay to put your babies and toddlers in care for 8+ hours a day.

Neither my parents nor yours had a similar lifestyle to yours. No I don't need to know more about your lifestyle to know that. I am sorry you are so triggered by this to suggest I am saying things that you just made up. You say it's not a competition as to who had it hardest, but even your first post is a complaint that your mum truthfully said that having children has always been expensive. Either give that some thought or give her a pass. Your struggles with working are different from hers as a full time parent, but they are both true.

Which is why you referred to her as "over 80". Sure.

Yes..but bashing the silent generation who lived through the war isnt fashionable

I know what you mean but no one really likes being negatively stereotyped do they? I’m technically a boomer but I can still remember being a young person and I still think it’s awful for young people now in a way it wasn’t when I was in my 20s. I can’t say I had it particularly easy as I bought my first property and then found that mortgage interest rates went up to 15% which was a huge blow and when I left university in the mid 80s there weren’t many jobs either.

BUT I didn’t leave university with a massive debt. Property prices were still affordable and it was only multiples of around three times salary. We didn’t worry about whether we’d ever be able to retire as there were decent pensions etc. We also weren’t providing a massive welfare bill for a huge number of people on pensions and social care and frankly people didn’t live as long either.

I know a lot of people in their 70s and 80s and I think many of them (but by no means all) wind themselves up about how tough they’ve had it and how easy young people have it. They’re obsessed about having to pay taxes and there’s a lot of ‘in my day’ and ‘I’ve worked all my life’ going on. I blame the Daily Mail and Telegraph for a lot of it. I change the subject or point out all the ways they had it easier.

If your mum’s bitter she’s unlikely to change. See it as a challenge not to let it wind you up!

Just to be clear, in the post I was responding to, you had a problem with me suggesting your mum was paying 4k a month on childcare, which obviously I wasn't and didn't because that would be ridiculous. They were very different times in many different ways.

My mum is really competitive about hardship. We've finally bought a house ( we're mid-forties) and we've had to spend every last penny we have on it to the point where we'll be on blow-up mattresses and she keeps saying they were in the same position when they bought their first house. The difference is that they were 25 and had it all paid off without her ever working by the time they were my age! It's beyond annoying.

I went to uni
1989 to 1992
I had a grant
Plus I worked in all the holidays

I said it and in response to the comment
“There were fees in the 90s and no grant”

I just replied there were fees in the 90s but only from 1998. I know little about grants beyond that some in my year still got them when I went in 1998 but also that they had changed structure vs what was previously available so you got lots less money vs a couple of years earlier and that prior to the level of grant dropping it had been frozen for a while. Anyway while I don’t know a lot about grants I am pretty confident the statement there was no grant in the 90s isn’t correct.

Your child doesn’t HAVE to move away for uni? I’m in Scotland and it’s pretty common for kids to go to their local uni and live at home.

Not many people went to uni in those days

I typed my thesis on a manual typewriter

It was Tony Blair that had the slogan education, education
Then more of the population went to uni

I don't think so necessarily. Your parents will have foregone her income and had a very reduced budget in order for her to be at home with you.

They still 'paid' that money, just in a different way (and in any case childcare wasn't nearly as available then as it is now).

You lost me at "boomer" tbh. Nasty.

Sure - but it’s the dismissive comment and lack of interest or empathy in the situation that is exasperating.

I don’t refute that my parents had to make sacrifices, nor think having children in the past was a walk in the park.

The exasperation expressed by OP (and echoed by me in my example) is more about the lack of interest or empathy in the changed circumstances of today, driven I suspect by (and that suspicion largely from the answers on this thread…!) the belief that things are so much incredibly easier today.

My parents were very comfortably off, even on one wage btw. That kind of lifestyle would be difficult to achieve today (largely because of high house prices).

It’s because when they moved in to their first home (the one that as a proportion of their income cost way less than the equivalent home today) they didn’t have carpet straight away.

And they survived the 15% mortgage rates of the 80s (the ones that, again, due to house-price-to-income ration meant buyers were still significantly better off then than today).

I can’t talk to my parents about it, from their retirement property - converted barn in 2 acres, mum only had pin money jobs and was mostly a SAHM. It moves me to PURE RAGE.

Semantics I know but my 83 year old mum is silent generation not a boomer. 1946 onwards then a boomer yes.

over 6k
Bills included
WiFi included
Ensuite shower.
Shared kitchen (7 share)
Internet included.
Bus pass (optional) included
Bike shed.

Depends on uni and type of accommodation. This was the he cheapest at the uni.