To not feel very sorry for some student loan whiners

[Viviennemary]

There's been a lot of complaining about student loans and its wrong they seemed to have move the goalposts re paying back. StillI I read about this woman complaining her student loan is £120k and is going up every year. She was a student for 10 years fgs. Just as well the tax payer wasn't funding her. I hope these folk arent just going to be let away with not paying.

You misread. I quoted someone elses figures from the point they were trying to make. I couldnt care less what the figures are, her figures didnt back up her point.

That's irrelevant though. It doesn't matter why someone didn't go to university.

This is the system as it is.The fact is that degrees open doors to thousands of jobs that absolutely will not even consider someone without a degree.

Now, whether or not that is a good thing is debatable, but if you have a degree in the UK you can expect to earn more money and so renders any argument that going to university is pointless as complete nonsense.

There are huge numbers who don’t pay off the loans. How on earth are people to get to university of the sector paid for? It’s also now a salary uplift of around 8%. Many grads don’t earn much and don’t pay much each month. However they should not have changed the rules.

Please explain your thinking.

Why does a nurse, paramedic, dietician, radiographer, or physiotherapist actually need to go to university?

Why can't they enter the profession at 18 and be trained on the job by their employer, with in-house theory lessons as well as practical lessons?
What is it about university that makes the magic difference?

If all the government subsidy that currently goes to universities was stopped, and instead diverted to the NHS, they could afford the training programmes.

LBC interviewed a woman who did a maths degree followed by a nursing degree and was complaining about the size of the loan, but there was no recognition that she did a maths degree which she did not then put to good use to support the economy. Obviously the tax payer should not fund degrees that no-one is going to use and it's on the student to make wise choices in the first place or pay the price.
On the other hand, the interest rate is grossly unfair, particularly when the credit losses (which are high) are underwritten by the government and not part of the pricing. That urgently needs to be addressed.
IN principle, if appropriately priced, it's a tax on future high income earners and that's not an awful principle, although I'd rather see a much simplified tax structure.

I agree, but students AREN'T to blame for the fact that lots of jobs/professions are now degree-only entry whereas a few decades ago, there were entry routes for A levels (or even O levels) and/or college diplomas. It's NOT the student's fault that older people (business owners, policiticians, civil servants) have decided to make so many relatively low paid jobs, such as nurses and police into degree (or equivalent) entry only professions. Stop blaming the young for the Uni fiasco, they are the victims, not the cause!

I havent sat through a single one. I have had mortgage advice and quote etc etc. And every single one i took home, tried to work out the implications and then spoke to other people (independant) i know to make sure i fully understood the implications.

I didnt just ask how much mortgage i could get, how much the monthly payment was and sign on the dotted line. That, in my eyes is why this country has so many issues with housing they cant afford and student debt they dont understand.

I feel very sorry for students now. The financial implications of going to university are huge, assuming you don’t have parents or a trust fund footing the bill. In my day there were no fees and living costs were manageable. Now students face racking up thousands in debt and many are choosing not to take the university route because of it.

The student loans situation is very unfair and penalises those not lucky enough to have parental support. We are missing out on a lot of talent because of it.

Very nasty most of the time. Just from the thread title and the use of the word ‘whining’ I could have guaranteed the thread was started by @Viviennemary

I am not blaming the young at all. Where did you get that impression?
I am blaming the whole system - mostly blaming the politicians and universities.
Also blaming employers.

Unfortunately, schools tell pupils to do subjects that they enjoy rather than encouraging them to think about future careers/professions. That choice goes back as far as when they're 14 and choosing their GCSE's, choices made then clearly have an impact on what A levels they can take, which in turn impacts choices as to degree subject choice, which in turn impacts on career/profession options.

Fair enough, lots of "degree only" careers/professions don't care what subjects you have, but a lot do. Not choosing Art as a GCSE makes it difficult to, say, go into architecture. But how many 14 year olds would make that link when they're good at Maths and Physics (i.e. geometry etc), but not that bothered about drawing houses or trees, doing screen printing, etc?? Likewise, you're going to struggle for a career in healthcare if you opted out of Biology at the first available subject choice to drop it, but in early years of secondary school, biology is more about plants and animals than humans so easy to drop. Not many people have strong views about future careers when they're 14 or 15!

I don’t need your bleeding heart, thanks. I studied as a mature student, there was no funding for any of my university education - I fell between the gaps at every stage. I paid for my qualifications as I took them - around £50k when all is said and done. I was very fortunate in many ways, but studying and working full time to fund it was no easy path but one that has paid dividends.

That doesn’t mean I can’t have empathy for people who made seemingly sensible decisions aged 17/18 that have had a career long impact on their finances in a way that wasn’t predicted and with moving goal posts.

It's also obvious that student housing providers are hiking rents up to the level which is covered by the "living" student loan. I was utterly shocked to see the rents charged for pretty bog standard student accommodation. Leaving very little left over for living expenses such as food! Just yet another way in which the young are being screwed over by property owners, landlords, institutional investors etc (including Unis who own their own student accommodation who are also ripping off their students to make money, so not just businesses!).

They didn’t pay for them though did they? University was funded by local authorities until 1998 and they also provided maintenance grants that weren’t required to be paid back. Labour introduced fees in 98 when means tested fees of £1k were introduced (which incidentally is the equivalent of £2k today, not £9k that younger people have paid).

I don’t think it’s unreasonable for people on plan 2 to think that it’s unfair that they are paying 14% interest on loans. The loans should be interest free.

Honestly, reading this thread is so disheartening

There's some really horrible comments (and posters) on here.

Who do you think students can get advice from? Independent financial advisers wouldn't touch student loans as there's no money/commission in it for them. Parents may be no better at understanding finances that students themselves. So who else is there for a 17/18 year old to get advice from??

Yes, the universities themselves of course. They had student unions, student support services, etc. None of whom were offering advice on the detrimental aspects of student loans! The universities were advocating FOR taking out full student loans, so it wasn't "unbiased" advice.

It WAS mis-selling.

Maybe unintentional, maybe just incompetent in that Uni staff didn't themselves understand, so just followed the crowd/trend, after all a lot of the presentations were basically "copy and paste" from other universities or following Martin Lewis!

My DD’s are both affected. Dd1 will never pay her back as she can’t hold down a job (autism) but dd2 earns well, whines about paying higher rate tax just 3 years out of university and earns plenty in extras (complicated) yet her loan is going up not down despite heft monthly repayments. That’s where the problem lies. Not issue with her paying back what she borrowed (partly because she didn’t have to borrow so much, we gave her enough) plus inflation is fair, it’s the +3% that’s the killer, my dsds mortgage has a lower rate than that

Do your own research. If you had an ounce of capacity to reflect, you would have checked your beliefs and realised how ill-informed you are.

It appears you don't understand how the scientific method works.

If you want to determine the effect of a particular variable (i.e. the difference going to university makes), you find two populations that are the same in every respect apart from the variable you are testing.
So you test two populations of equal intelligence, academic aptitude, etc., and then see which was better off by going or not going to university.

If one population is not like the other one, no valid conclusion can be drawn.

Don't mix up cause and effect, or mistake causes: yes those who go to university earn more over their lifetimes, but it may not be because they went to university. It may just be that they are the most intelligent 40% of the population, so were always going to earn more, uni or not.

This is the system as it is. The fact is that degrees open doors to thousands of jobs that absolutely will not even consider someone without a degree.
That is precisely what I am criticising.
The population of people who could have gone to university but chose not to is currently very small. I believe that will change.

So you can't answer. Just emotion. No facts.

Yes, I did the same. Got a crap poorly paid job in an accountancy practice, just to get a foot in the door. Then studied in my own time, alongside a full time job, paying my own course fees, exam fees, etc and using my sparse annual holiday entitlement for the exam days and a few days of studying beforehand. I worked up from making the tea and doing the filing, and once I'd passed a handful of the 17 exams, I got a proper "training" job in a bigger firm of accountants, and then continued with the exams etc which took 5 years. So I know how hard it is.

My son chose a different profession (higher entry requirements). He spent 3 years at Uni getting his First in Maths, which is completely irrelevant to the job/profession he does, but was essential to get the job in the firm he's with. Now he's in the job, he had five years of doing the professional exams (13 in total) for his profession. So that's 8 years to get the professional qualification, the first three being more or last wasted, but essential to get the "foot in the door". Yes, some of the professional exams include bits he learned in his degree, but he could have learned them anyway had he not done the degree. So basically, the only benefit of the degree was to get through an arbitrary application process where someone had decided a Maths degree was the line in the sand to weed out the numbers.

As said above, my Godfather was in the same profession as my son, but he went it at the ground floor with just school leavers qualifications, no degree, and ended up on the Board of directors! Just shows how times have changed, and for no obvious benefit to the young worker!!

Many universities are as dependent financially on the rents from accommodation as they are on the course fees.
This was why, during the Covid pandemic, they insisted on student attending in person and not staying at home to study remotely. The students came, paid rent, and then were metaphorically locked in their rooms to study remotely anyway.

Truly a scandal, but it is in whose interests to hold the universities accountable?

On average (from ONS) in the UK people with a degree earn ~27% more annually than those without. The gap on earnings for women is larger - a woman with a degree can expect to earn about £250,000 more than a non-graduate over their working life.

Is that average a mean or a median though? If its a mean, there will be some very well paid doctors, lawyers, bankers etc pulling it up considerably.

For me the big issues around the loans are:

• changing goalposts. The "interest" is meant to be to reflect inflation, and the threshhold at which you start repaying was to protect lower earners. Its not reasonable that they have changed the rules by freezing the threshhold.
• the communication that "it doesn't matter about how much you owe because most people won't pay it off", when actually the policy intention at the moment is to make changes that lead to a much higher proportion of students eventually paying it off. This has been done with recent plans by increasing the age at which its written off.

So if you start from a premise that the government wants you to eventually pay it off, you need to question - is this degree going to lead to high enough earnings to justify what it will cost me? In reality what underpins this is there are too many low quality degrees that do not lead to higher earnings, and too many public sector roles which are underpaid.

The answer?

• subsidies/grants for teachers/nurses etc who stay working in the public sector at least 25 hours a week for 20 years.
• a reduction in the number of places funded on lower value degree courses that do not lead to higher earnings

I had to take out the maximum as my parents couldn't afford to support me. In London this was 10k/year. Obviously that gets you nowhere in London so I also had a full time job.

Yes, I agree. On top of mis-selling student loans, they mis-sold the "uni experience" in 2020 as they desperately tried to get students to sign up for courses. They promised "blended" learning as a sop to try to persuade students to sign up for their accommodation, but in the event, most of it was online only so there was no need for the students to be on campus anyway, especially with most other things being closed/locked too, i.e. no face to face clubs/societies, gyms and libraries closed, no teaching/academic staff on site, etc. So that was another mis-selling scandal they got away with.

My son was in that cohort. I still have screen shots of the Uni webpages "promising" as near "normal" as possible with blended learning, dated July, but once the applications deadline had passed in August, the website was changed to "mostly remote with only "in person" where necessary" for essential lab work etc. Funny how they changed the wording once they'd sucked in the students to sign up for courses and accommodation. In the event, our DS had no face to face at all for the first academic year, so he didn't need to be there, and face to face was limited for most of the second year too. It was only his third year where most of the lectures/seminars/tutorials were in person!