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.

@angelos02they did some research about nursing and degrees and found the following.So maybe if you don’t value life then yes stop nurses doing degrees!

Research indicates that higher proportions of bachelor’s degree-educated nurses are associated with lower patient mortality and reduced "failure to rescue" rates. A 10% increase in bachelor's degree nurses is linked to a 7% decrease in patient deaths following common surgery. Conversely, low staffing levels combined with lower education levels significantly increase mortality risks

Because they’re don’t just carrying out tasks. They’re making decisions and need degree level education to do so.

Nurses carry out lots of procedures and make clinical decisions that traditionally doctors would do. They even prescribe medications. The underpinning knowledge is needed to ensure the best care.

Do you know what a nurse actually does?

Are you joking? You seriously believe that?

This is an interesting statistic. Thank you for sharing. I certainly wasn’t aware but as an academic I like to see that deeper learning pays off.

But it wasn't a career in literature was it? You will have done extra training/studying for your chosen career that paid the bills. You almost certainly could have entered that career without a degree back in the day. So really, there is little, if any, link between your degree, your career and your earnings.

Some borrow the max loan AND work multiple PT jobs. I’m an academic so see this happen fairly often. Not everyone has familial wealth to fall back on, many students need the loan to survive (especially in a big expensive city).

Look, I sympathise with that woman because I was at uni for 8 years to PhD level so also have accrued lots of debt I’ll never repay. Such is life, I wanted to do this job and I love it so it’s fine.

Are you really saying that a nurse can't be taught/learn the skills without having gone to Uni? That somehow, such skills can't be learned/taught in other environments such as in-house training, external training courses, etc. Why does it have to be a degree taught in a Uni?

It's not just the skills. It's the background science, medicine and understanding. Also legal implications and all sorts of complex knowledge.
It needs to be taught and tested rigorously with no gaps
Lots of jobs are not only 'skills'

But you won't get science/medicine etc with a literature degree which was my point. It'll have been "taught" in the workplace long after the Uni degree.

Why does making clinical decisions require a degree? It doesn't. With enough in-depth, in-house education and training, the professional can be competent to make such decisions

A hundred years ago, a degree, going to university, was an experience of classic academic education, and/or scientific research. It was for the 2 to 5% who wanted to study deeply and do research.
It was not job training for a multitude of professions, or a vague career boost for 40-50% of the population.
This is what I am criticising.

All of that can be done outside of university, at a cost far less than £27,000.

My DD has a degree to be an allied health professional... why does she need a degree?
Because of the level of knowledge and ability to put that into practice that is required.

My Mum was a nurse and midwife, she didn't have a degree, she didn't even have the equivalent of A-levels, she was blown away with what my DD needs know (the reports she has to write, the H&S, the safeguarding) and is required to do, on top of huge responsibility.

Stuff my mum never had to do...

On a practical level, there is not enough exp staff to mentor all these students... when my DD has a student on placement, her workload ie patients she sees, drops by 50%, sometime these students require handholding to the nth level, her workload drops even further.

Degrees are needed for HCP and AHPs the world over, very few countries do not have degree entry.

With the greatest respect, the world has moved on in the last 100 years

Some of us wouldn't be able todo that off our own back and will definitely need proper guidance. You remind me of my friend who is amazing at research, managed to cure his own and his wife's cancer apparently and is convinced anyone can do this .
He doesn't believe in doctors, thinks they are all taught wrong deliberately by the pharmaceutical industry and we could all treat ourselves of everything.

He's a lovely guy and he means well and he could be right about certain things but I don't think you should just encourage everyone to just be able to self teach some of us are as thick as fck and have too much confidence to know that.

Can I ask why you feel it would cost far less?

My mum trained as a nurse through nursing college when not all nurses had degrees. It didnt look like a much cheaper to deliver route, it took 3 years. I understand she counted in ratios a bit earlier and degree students were supernumerary at the same point, bit she got a bursary and they got a means tested loan. The main difference seemed to be a dissertation and a couple of modules. They sat in a lot of the same lesson.

But studenys from lower incone fami.ies get a bigger loan in the first place as they dont have parents able to subsidise them

Peehaps a person who actually spent more time actualky caring for parients ratger than writing reports should be recruited without degrees

No it wasn’t a career in literature - publishing didn’t appeal to me. It was a career which required the ability to research and organise information, write clearly to present a logical argument, distil complex information into easily understood language and answer questions concisely and factually. Guess where I learnt all that? On my degree course. A degree in humanities may not be vocational but it’s evidence of a trained mind and I most definitely wouldn’t have had the career I had without my degrees - as I progressed a masters was required.

I didn't say £75k of debt though, did I? I said that's what going to uni costs and has to be "funded by a combination of loans, parents, student holiday/part time jobs".

Amazing how many people commenting on this thread either can't read or are financially illiterate.

Some parents who are supposed to subsidise their offspring don't provide this financial support either - there is no legal requirement.

If your family income is low enough you will get some support through bursaries that do not need to be repaid.

You don't have to take the bigger loan if you are able to get holiday/part-time work or take a pre-university gap year to work and save up.

@WW3Most are financially illiterate about student loans but it’s on AIBU not the HE forum.

Its been perfectly clear for 15 years that if the government decides to lift the cap on student numbers so 37.% of school leavers go and not a lower %, they have to be paid for and there are not enough well paid grad vacancies to go round. It’s easier for stem students but arts students are not earning enough to pay anything back frequently. The state might pay for all of their education and maintenance.

A significant proportion of students never fully repay loans so tax payers do pay.

But people don’t fully “pay off” their loans due to interest. I bet a significant proportion do pay off a lot of the initial loan but the balance doesn’t reduce. For example in 2025 I paid student loans finance approximately £2000 but due to interest my balance only reduced by £100.

@Noalcohol26or they never make the repayment income threshold

What, 26K?!

@Noalcohol26yes..

Part time workers, people who stop working to parent, etc etc etc.