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.

Don't speak for me. I spent months in hospital recently and I have literally no idea how you arrived at that ridiculous conclusion.

Well maybe you were at a better hospital

Well my mum was in a district hospital for 3 weeks, followed by 3 weeks in a smaller one, the staff nurses were fine.

When i broke my hip, my stay in Derriford was very good, my FiL has spent a lot of time in Hospital recently, no issues with the care or the Staff Nurses.

3 different hospitals, 3 good experiences.

Perhaps your experience is more to do with how you perceive nursing staff?

Different hospitals.

Interested to know, how did you decide who had a degree and who didn't?

How the poster treats them may also be a factor.

What evidence do you have of this? It sounds like something you have made up, to be honest.

Student loan amounts are dependent on parental income, so you can’t just decide to take the maximum, unless you are referring to people who decide to do very long courses like medicine or architecture.

it sounds unlikely that large numbers of people would decide not to work simply to avoid paying back their loan because they still get to keep the majority of their earnings. The amount they pay is dependent on their earnings, not the size of the loan.

I think the thing that does happen is that some move abroad to avoid paying back their loans.

Yeah it’s completely rubbish. No one is paying off their tuition fees with their part time job money.

Yes esp as the loan accrues interest long before the student leaves Uni, the pp has either no idea or is posting mis information.

Schools need to stop posting % of pupils who went onto University as an accolade. Because it's not them that's taking on the debt, it's the individual students.

Ok, soft degree courses aside, what is the alternative for bright A level students?

What would you advise my DD to do to be able to work in Health and fore fill her wish to be like her Gran and help people?

The problem isn't the schools, the students or the Uni's, its the loans system, a system no one else in Europe has, with quite high levels of Uni participation.

You are aware that not all nurses work in hospitals?

And how would you know about the nurses qualifications? It’s not on their uniform

NHSE? Do you meant NHS England They don’t give any bursary.

NHS Wales give a means tested bursary - this is not anywhere near enough to live on and students still have to work. It pays their fees in exchange for students working for them for 2 years

Because virtually all nurses have bloody degrees these days so it's a pretty good guess

But you said you could tell which nurses had degrees - now you say they all do? So which is it?

And you’re not particularly polite either. Why are you so angry about degrees?

Ah yes. Absolutely clueless. Thanks for confirming.

@Blushingmsorry I meant NHSBSA.

The problem is the country cannot afford to cancel student loans. Many never pay them off anyway. Some run up thousands in degrees not leading to better pay and do pay little.

A female on the news this morning stated her loan was £50,000 and she'd only paid £500 towards it in 6 years. Well of course it won go down then.

It feels more like a lifetime loan that won't be repaid by most.

VERY few people are suggesting cancelling them. MOST people are rightly complaining about the very high interest rates being charged AND that the threshold for repayments is being held and not increased in line with earnings, i.e. "fiscal drag".

There was actually a vote in Parliament the other night for restricting interest on the loans to RPI, i.e. keeping interest at a reasonable/sensible level, which was thrown out by a large majority, so the MPs clearly don't care about students.

The complaint is more about the mis-selling of student loans, the lies that were told to naive/young students, i.e. that the earnings threshold for repayments WOULD be adjusted yearly in line with inflation, and no warnings that interest could end up so high. You know, the kind of things that any other financial product is ham-strung by regulation under the Financial services acts to protect against mis-selling, with compensation available for those mis-sold. Funny how it doesn't apply to student loans.

Thanks. I agree with you about regulation to address the issues you mentioned.

They give to doctors and dentists not nursing students. English nursing students pay fees and take loans for those fees as well for living expenses

But what is wrong with the UK?

We are an outlier on tuition fees in Europe, where the fees are considerably lower, despite quite high Uni attendance.

If we are to avoid the Covid NHS scandals again, have a highly qualified workforce etc then we need to start looking at how we encourage young people into Healthcare, Science, Engineering etc.

We wont do that by lumping our youth with huge debt, coupled with a punishing repayment scheme, we'll just end up with young people giving up, so more and more NEETs.

As a person who got a free university education, a maintenance grant and could claim benefits during holidays, meaning that with the help of a part time job, I was actually able to leave uni better off than when I started, I feel very sorry for them, and would be happy if part of my tax payments went towards writing the debts off.

Same. I didn’t end up better off but the rest applies to me too.

There's a petition on the mn petitions site regarding the huge interest rate, it's worth a sign and share as widely as posdible. Expats can sign too. I don't particularly like the wording on the petition but at least whoever set it up had the ooomph to do so