to feel so sad for my DC re university

[oldinboden]

We are really poor ( ie entitled to working tax credits) My Dc are all fairly right.The eldest is doing GCSEs this year and has always assumed he would go to university,He is at GS and nearly everyone goes.But I really don't think he will be able to .I mean tuittion fees just for a 3 year course will be £27,000 and then living costs on top of that.
I went to Cambridge and it scarcely cost me a penny.I got a grant and huge bursary from the college.

Riven

I do know that there are a lot of cutbacks in teh research scientists post I have a very good friend who works out there and is working at quite a high level yet lot of them are havong wage cutbacks grants harder to find to .Though he works in public sector rather than private and the private sector is cutting back even more

When I was 18 only about 5-6 per cent went on to uni or polytechnic, etc. I'm not sure that a degree should be such a quintessential requirement. From a recruitment point of view I certainly am sick and tired to finding it difficult to hire young people with 2:1's who can barely string together grammatically correct sentences. A huge number of these young people have, IMO, been duped - they are no better equipped than a sound A'Level entrant was at the end of the 1970's/early 1980's.

Funding would be better directed at schools and at teacher training colleges to drive up standards from the earliest stages possible.

Riven I'm on a path aiming towards biomedical research and I'm doing an OU degree with a hope to do a masters at Imperial - would your ds be interested in something like that?

I thought the reasoning behind penalising graduates for making early repayments was that they wanted everyone to be on a equal footing i.e rich or poor they wanted you saddled with debt. But this isn't the case is it? Beacause students from wealthy backgrounds will be able to pay their fees up front.

In typical Tory fashion the rich get richer whereas the rest of the country are fucked.

pippop1 LBS is one of the worlds top business schools. Lots of people get their employers to pay if they do the executive route. Also unlike a degree it really does pay for itself with increased earing potential.

In the US the whole system is much more set up for people to work their way through Uni. So Unis expect students to be working, they provide jobs and have links with local employers eg. UPS offered jobs where 50% of the wages was cash and 50% went straight as credit for Uni fees. It is also more flexible so students can take longer if they need to to keep financially afloat.

However this has been obviously coming for years, and is part of the reason my DH and I couldn't afford private education.

There will be funds available for really poor students, and alternative routes to degrees. Although I do wonder if degrees in humanities will become mainly the preserve of the rich.

One thing I noticed when I came to the UK was the tendency for people to choose a university far from home, presumably going for the one which was the best for the course they wanted to study.

Where I grew up teenagers tended to all go to their local university. Yes they were sometimes restricted in the courses offered (eg I might have done architecture nut it wasn't available locally) but they often could live at home while studying which made it more feasible for poorer families.

I can see this happening more here in the UK...

When I went to Uni, tuition fees were £1000 a year and I still left with a mountain of debt. My student loan only just covered my rent......there was no spare cash for utilities/food/books or a pint in the pub. The only option I had was to run up overdrafts and credit card bills to pay for everything.

I don't regret going to uni because I learned a lot, had fun and it's where I met my husband. I have never had a graduate job though and am now a sahm. Financially it really wasn't worth it.

do you think you would have been better or worse off under this new system, bonfireblue ? I would imagine it depends a bit on what you decide to do later in life but on the face of it you'd not have to pay back anything at this stage of your life in the new system but under the old one the CC and overdraft still need dealing with regardless.

What I don't understand is why you're penalised for early repayment of the debt. Surely a government ought to encourage people to pay off loans as soon as they possibly can, or am I missing something?

abr1de. Its cause the loans are subject to interest so the longer the loan is still outstanding the more money is paid back.

Riven I don't understand why living at home for uni is not a feasible option? Surely feeding an 18-21yo is not that much different than a 15-18yo and additional utility bills must be marginal. If staying at home for uni students can still get part time work and pay their parents a sum toward their upkeep rather than a much higher sum to another landlord, plus fewer travelling costs etc.

I agree it's a terrible shame that we are losing heavily subsidised university education but I do think that it will encourage the more motivated students to fully research their options of they really want to go. The whole fee/subsidy/loan system will not be straightforward (I don't know how it's going to work and there is a lot of misinformation on discussion threads) and there will be grants and bursaries available. The students who will be discouraged will often (ok not exclusively) be the ones who are not certain that they want to study for a degree and are just falling into uni as a default option.

Perhaps taking a gap year will become a money-earning thing to do rather than a travel the world opportunity. Perhaps more people will work for a few years before getting an idea of what they want to do and then go to uni later.

I'm really sorry for those of you that have children already in mid-teens, for those with much younger kids (like myself) I guess we have to follow the example of the US and be thinking about 'college funds' from babyhood.

runningrach Child benefit and tax credits stop for Uni age/level study so the young adult would need to get work and pay keep just to break even.

ds2 has set his heart on university as wants to do pathology/Forensic Science career route and is looking at Cambridge only postive side is that w elive near enough that he can stay at home but does know he is going to have to work

I keep thinking I want dd to have the option of going to uni if she wants to. Then I think about how I would be better off now if I had dropped out of school without any qualifications and not even thought about uni. :(

Well how many of you are prepared to spend 6k+ on performing arts, comedy studies and all the other crackpot subjects that are offered and taken up whilst the fees are met by the state. I really think a little integrity needs to be reintroduced to the system quite frankly.

I still am amazed that in the 1980s my two SILS had a uni education at two of the best uni's in the UK for free and neither of them has ever done a days work in this country - and for that matter very little in any other country either.

given that we suck up plenty of doctors, nurses etc from other, often poorer, countries which paid for their training, we can't moan about a bit of brain drain going the other way IMO....

But Riven the market needs to address these issues. I don't understand why the state should fund subjects that parents/students aren't prepared to fund. I certainly will not be funding "soft" subjects just so my dc can attend uni for the experience.

Perfectly happy to fund academic courses, ie, law, medicine, nursing, English, teaching, classics, maths, sciences, history, languages, etc., etc.. But if the dc want to do art, dance, etc., they know they can pay their debt.

Runningrach - staying at home isn't an option for many, not everybody lives close to a university.

Why would your daughter not get a job? Yes university is about more than getting a good job, but it's a question of priorities and I'm not sure that graduates today are any better educated than A'Level students were 20 or 30 years ago.

There is a big difference between university and vocational training and lines have become much too blurred IMO. People need to start to understand that they can't keep taking out from society and never putting anything back in.