To think student funding is in crisis and yet another area this government just can’t be bothered to fix.

[Fr00tL00ps]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-67206767

To get access to full loans your family needs to earn under £25k. In this climate many families above can’t afford to top up and fund now sky high rental fees and utilities as they’re paying for rises in their own. There is now a two tier uni experience with the children of those under £25k and richer families able to top up able to attend uni full time and eat.

Why is it ok for for young people to live in poverty just because they’re students ? Also why is parental income taken into account for an 18 year old at uni living away from home but not for an 18 year old living at home receiving Universal Credit?

@Heidi75 absolutely spot on.

The £3698 figure is for students living at home. Students living away from home get a minimum of £4651 (£6485 in London). The BBC’s average rent figure will be inflated by including London, and includes catered and private halls, as well as halls that are specifically designed for people with a lot of money to spend.

I’m not saying loans will always cover outgoings, but the top-up needed generally isn’t an amount that couldn’t be raised.

I worked during university doing two evenings and a weekend day at a call centre making just over £700 a month. I begrudged it, but I still had plenty of time to study, could afford a pretty comfortable lifestyle, and got a good degree. Life would have been easier if I had rich parents, but that’s the case for absolutely everything.

The current system for maintenance loans may not be feasible for medical students and certain others, but it is affordable and doable for the vast majority of students, even if it doesn’t provide the most comfortable and salubrious lifestyle.

I'm not attacking degrees at all, several members of my family have engineering degrees.

I'm saying that 'Mickey Mouse' degrees are neither use nor ornament.

I want someone to unblock my khazi, service my car, and prune my trees, not some IT whizz kid to design me yet another app.

Haven’t read thread so don’t know if it’s been mentioned but they were talking about student finance, specifically rent costs, on the Jeremy Vine show today (with female presenter).

I don't think people realise how dire government finances are, worst of all is the government is paying £100 billion a year just in interest on its loans now rates have gone up. Fixing education, NHS, crime, social care properly would cost £100s of billions.

My dss is having 2 gap years to save up funds to take to uni.

I went in 1997-2000.
I think the biggest change between now and then has been to the rents that students have to pay.

Whereas when I went student housing was cheap it has been commercialised and there are now companies specialising in 'luxury' student accomodation. The rents are crazy.

DSS wants to go to Bristol but the rent is far higher than the loan he is entitled to take.

Surely there should have been planning conditions imposed that student housing was to be rented out at below market rate.

I actually despair at this country.

My dd is at Exeter uni & she has just been told she will be receiving an Access to Exeter bursary of £800. This is to help students whose parents earn less than approximately 30k. This is such a relief, but it seems wrong that the sliding scale for parental income starts so low.

Also at Exeter uni, those students whose parents earn less than 25k will receive an Access to Exeter bursary for £2100/£1260 per year depending on how much they earn. The 25-30k section only began last year.

One thing that is bizarre is that a resident parent’s live-in partner’s income is included for student loan calculations as ‘household income,’ but a non-resident parent’s live-in partner’s income isn’t included for child maintenance calculations.

Why should an unrelated adult have to pay another adult’s living costs?

Surely @Blankscreen the biggest change as compared with when you went is the number of UK DCs now going to university, plus the increase in international student numbers. Add to that years under governments of both colours of new housing supply in general falling hugely short in every single year of what is needed. It not a great surprise where we find ourselves. Simple supply and demand, not great anywhere and even worse in certain student towns and cities.

and possibly worse when student halls in many of the relatively newer Uni are not Uni owned either. And that before we get to living out, as most 2nd years and beyond, will need to.

... there is also a up to 5k bursary from the NHS for those choosing to study a health care profession. Not just nursing, but also physiotherapy, radiology, midwifery, ...

@Ylvamoon but not for DC studying to become doctors. The fallout of this mess is a big financial barrier to DC from less privileged backgrounds studying medicine. Not a good thing for society as a whole.

I agree the system is ridiculous.

I would make a full loan eligible to all, with stricter parameters to pay back and no cancellation for moving abroad which is probably why we lose so many drs and other health professionals.

To be honest though, because we are having to subsidise both our dc’s as we only get the minimum loan, it will be better for them in the long run because they will have less to pay back. Some of the kids with low income parents will have so much to pay back it puts them at a disadvantage which seems unfair.

@Icelolly999 there is no cancellation of doctors' debt if they move abroad. They move because junior doctor pay rates are so much lower than they can get abroad and because their UK working conditions are awful. A carrot of debt cancellation if they stay in the NHS for a fixed period would be so much more of an incentive than any stick approach. They are taking enough of a bashing at the moment.

The would-be medic DC who are really facing financial barriers are the ones whose parents are just over the full loan threshold in terms of income but with insufficient money to subsidise them. These DC are not in a position to do any part time work to make up the shortfall and it makes it impossible for them.

How does it work in Wales?

I wonder if things will change if universities start struggling.to fill places because people stop going.

I don’t think things will change - universities will just increase their numbers of international students.

Everybody gets the maximum amount of maintenance loan regardless of parental income. Part of that loan becomes a grant depending on parental income. So those on low incomes end up owing less.

That's not right. The maximum loan is linked to parental income. There's no grant.

Sorry, that'll teach me for not reading properly. That sounds heaps better for students.

At the end of the day you get a degree make it to good use and you earn on average 10k a year more over your working life it can increase your earning potential by 350k by in vesting 40k to get degree
so no it shouldn’t be free
but there should be better finance options
it’s Chaos at the moment too many examples to list from people keep earnings below 29k so never pay it back to a woman getting a new partner and this partner’s income slashes the loan the kids nothing to do with new partner

it was on Jeremy vine today tbh the woman who was complaining that after she paid her rent did have enough money for the student experience as in socialising and going to student balls didn’t get my sympathy I don’t see why taxpayers should subsidise socialising

Late to this. But I’m a teacher. On my practices I taught all day and went straight to work to my bar job. I’ve worked since I was 14. However, this is what I needed to survive as I grew up in poverty.

Fortunately, I had no Uni fees, a full load, a bursary - a Labour gov in 1997-2000 (my uni years) got me where I am today. No way could I have gone to Uni without that.

DH and I have saved for our DC’s education (child benefit into ISA’s) but I doubt they’ll have the Uni experience we did. We want our kids to have part time work for the world of work experience. They do need to earn (not for parties but to cover their courses). I do not want them to work to eat one meal a week like the student in the article.

350k post grad? You’re having a laugh! I can only comment on teacher degrees but nope.

Don't forget that students always used to be able to sign on for unemployment benefit and get Housing Benefit during the summer holidays which was a substantial income boost. Under Universal Credit, the few catagories of students that can even apply are receiving a pittance comparatively

What would help would be proper careers advice in secondary schools and colleges, with all possible avenues into employment explored. Some degrees offer very poor value for money, however talk of "Mickey Mouse" degrees is often misguided when you look at the breakdown of the UK economy and what sectors actually contribute the most

I am not seeing many jobs suitable for students being advertised, merely odd ZHC and one-off positions. It's not as easy as people seem to think to mix studying with working. Also, given the state of university finances, why didn't they invest in student accommodation and themselves benefit from rents paid? That way they could have helped the poorest students directly with reduced rents. Seems utterly short-sighted on their part

Why would they? Their kids will be ok. They don’t want to address inequality so the more plebs don’t go to university the more they can retain their power and wealth. Vote for psychopaths, get psychopathic policy.

At the end of the day you get a degree make it to good use and you earn on average 10k a year more over your working life it can increase your earning potential by 350k by in vesting 40k to get degree

that average is largely meaningless though. The IFS published a detailed study only a few years ago (would be interesting if they did an update).

Going to university is a very good investment for most students. Over their working lives, men will be £130,000 better off on average by going to university after taxes, student loan repayments and foregone earnings are taken into account. For women, this figure is £100,000. (These and other numbers are in “discounted present value” terms, which means counting earnings later in life less than those earned earlier on. Without discounting, returns look much bigger.)

However, these average returns mask large differences across individuals. So while about 80% of students are likely to gain financially from attending university, we estimate that one in five students – or about 70,000 every year - would actually have been better off financially had they not gone to university.

At the other end of the spectrum, the 10% of graduates with the highest returns will on average gain around half a million pounds in discounted present value terms. Much of this variation is explained by the subject studied at university: students of medicine and law, for example, achieve very high returns on average, while few of those studying creative arts will gain financially from their degrees at all.

That's just about hard cash. As the authors note: This study only looks at financial returns. Other personal and social benefits may be as or more important

https://ifs.org.uk/publications/impact-undergraduate-degrees-lifetime-earnings

This - not even just not a grant - a loan which you are likely to pay over £20k in interest on.