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.

University is a rip-off for most people nowadays.

It no longer guarantees a good job for life as it did in the seventies/eighties.
Many of the degrees are not worth the paper they're written on and the students will never get a return on their investment as they're of little or no value to employers.

Unis are just profit-making businesses now that focus on growing their customer base with no regard for the students.
It's all about the money, money, money.

I dont agree with making parents pay either. Because i think someone earning 30k the child only gets half the maintenance loan. So may have to find maybe 15k for the child to go. Because of the size of 9k+ fees the extra 15k is limited difference to repayment unless tje student earns very well. 9k was always ridiculous when it changed i thinkbit was more than a private school place for a child!

We downsized our house and had money left over. I could have paid the student loan off but we decided to prioritise getting work done in the house that needed to be done. Had we paid student loan off it would have delayed the work we needed to have done. We could have got a loan for the work to be done and paid that back instead of student loan. I would have paid the loan off sooner than the student loan and then invested it.

Firstly, I think it’s outrageous that the gov are changing the terms! Secondly, I think the whole interest adding is nuts! There’s no need to add interest. It should be index linked, of course, and it should be 100% paid back in full. It’s not on that 70% of students ‘will never repay their loan’.
The problem with adding interest is that it bears very little relation as to what is actually paid.
How much did you borrow? And how much of that have you paid back? If you’re paying £100 a month, £1,200 a year, it’s going to take a fair few years to pay back just the fees, let alone any maintenance. If you borrowed fees & minimum loan (£9250 + £4000 ish is £13k per year, so £39,000). So if your original debt was £39,000, even disregarding index linking, your £100 a month repayments will take you 32.5yrs. Given your paying £100 a month you must be earning £38k a year. So £100 a month isn’t a huge amount. If interest wasn’t added I think you’d be inclined to pay off more and quicker. If we considered index linking (say inflation is 4%) that £39,000 in one year alone becomes £40,500 - so your £1200 a year is not even covering inflation let alone the original loan. As I say, there’s no need to add interest. Inflation (CPI, or RPI) yes, but not interest.

Do people want an educated workforce? Why should under 50s have to pay for older people’s pensions?

*It was made clear and yet here we are"

Yes well the repayment terms meant that going to university was an investment to get a higher paying job than you could likely get without a degree and you'd pay back some of the extra EarnIngs over the threshold

Doesn't really hold now that the repayment threshold is frozen at a level barely above 40 hour minimum wage...

Another way we have shafted the young, I think it’s a travesty

Most pensions are DC now rather than DB so at least the young aren’t going to be supporting pensioners for too much longer!
The other issue is that you now need a degree for most jobs (and a 2:1). The job market is also hideous even for graduates. So the value if obtaining a degree to get a better paid job is definitely diminishing. However, we definitely want a well educated society!

@NotDonna and what about the state pension & the demographic issue?

I agree degrees are devalued but we want an educated society

I never went to university but I immediately voted yabu because this is just so wrong , unfair and unequal .
It's an accident of when you were born and under whatever government that decided whether you pay nothing or for the rest of your life 😖.

The aging population is an issue in many ways. Added to low birth rates. But that’s another thread.

I think student loans are a must to enable ALL students to attend university. I definitely want an educated population who are critical thinkers. It’s not only about a higher paid job. The max maintenance loan should be available to everyone who wants it too as I know lots of parents who simply cannot find the difference. The repayments are definitely an issue though and there’s an incredible amount of disparity between the different plans. It’s also interesting that Scots & Welsh have a different system.

Annoyingly university courses are expensive and that’s why we are seeing the closure of departments etc.

The aging population is an issue in many ways. Added to low birth rates. But that’s another thread.

Its relevant when discussing pension costs.

I feel sorry for them. I don't want my daughter to go to university, the cost is a massive consideration for her. I think it's shite.

the problem is even though you don’t actually need a degree for certain jobs it’s often used as a CV sifting tool because so many do have them.

I had not long turned 17 when I applied for my student loan. I had absolutely no idea about the interest that would be loaded on to it. I was always told by teachers not to worry about it, that I would barely notice the payments each month. It’s so untrue, it’s a dent of my salary every month for 30+ years. If I’m having a hard time financially and take on more overtime then I get charged even more that month for it, so I essentially get paid less than my colleagues who didn’t go to uni.

My student loan debt has gone up £4k in the past two years, despite the fact I’ve been paying it off every month. You can’t win unless you’re rich and you can pay it off, or better yet, have rich parents in the first place so you don’t need a loan.

We don’t want you to feel sorry for us.

We actually couldn’t a give a shit what the average person thinks about our choices to take a student loan out. We knew what we were getting ourselves into when we entered the contracts with the student loans company. (Albeit not with the added interest thanks to the scumbag tories)

It‘s the government who we want to actually feel
something towards us and to act.

You are very nasty sometimes @Viviennemary

Our young people who paid a huge amount of money to get an education to work and pay our pensions are being ripped off paying a huge amount of interest.

It is not ‘whining’ to protest the changing of the goalposts.

I think prospective students need to apply critical thinking to student loan repayment costs and consider whether it's worth going to university or not. It should not be viewed as a middle-class rite of passage anymore, but as a period of training, done while other people are working and earning full-time wages.

Sometimes obtaining an education is the only thing that some people can do to escape the cycle of poverty.

I have family who took out loans to get their degrees and others whose lives were funded entirely by wealthy family members.

Having an education is not just a status symbol - it’s necessary for many to be able to participate in society.

As a side note I recognise a trade as an education.

You're right Vivienne, it's great to riddle youngsters with outrageous debts that put them off higher education. I mean, God forbid we have more highly educated people in this country to work in healthcare to help miserable, narrow minded nobs like you.

Whilst I'm here, I don't feel very sorry for old, lonely people with nothing better to do than create stupid posts on the internet that they're (clearly) not educated enough to understand.

Im pissed off i was sort of forced to Uni by my college and parents telling me what a waste it would be if I didnt go.

I went for 1 year and thank god I didnt drag it out longer. Im on plan 2 and by loan amount is £20,000 - for 1 year!!

Im making 50k (no thanks to the course) and my repayments are £225 a fucking month. Its horrific. I could lease a car for that. It makes me feel sick with regret and worry.

It feels like a punishment for something you aren't old enough to decide on at 18. I remember going to all these student finance lectures and they were saying "oh its like paying off the cost of 1 coffee a week - you wont notice it. Plus - if you dont go to university- you'll have a shitty little life... employers only want graduates!"

Just to add too... I think parents nowadays need to really be aware that these repayment costs are real and not insignificant amounts to repay each month. So dont force your kid off to university to study hospitality or photography for 3 years, because you think they "may as well".

University should be for pathways to careers which are genuinely impossible without a degree. Like medical and scientific careers.

I had Plan 1 for my undergrad degree, which I didn’t particularly begrudge, but then had to take out a Plan 2 loan for my PGCE. Paying £9k in tuition so that I was qualified to teach in the state sector, and spending most of that year working unpaid in placement schools, was dispiriting enough. The ever increasing interest and now a threshold freeze feels downright insulting.

My student debt is higher than it was when I graduated, and that’s after almost ten years of repayments while teaching in state schools. I’m on maternity leave now and still paying it.

I needed both my undergraduate and PGCE to teach in this country and yet here I am with 45k in debt. So far. If I keep teaching I’ll never pay it off.

Meanwhile my friends who went into more lucrative careers have already paid their loans back, with fewer interest charges. It’s not a fair system.

The real scandal is that the threshold has not increased with inflation, which is a clear movement of goal posts.

There was also a couple of years of high inflation that was completely out of step with anything seen since the 1970s and totally at odds with government policy.

But a lot of people are saying things that are clearly untrue like a PP who claims someone with a Plan 2 loan earning £30k is paying £200 pm, because they're absolutely not, its more like a tenth of that. So a lot of the claims need to be taken with a pinch of salt.

It was always clear that mid to high but not very high earners (eg if they earned around £50-80k pa averaged across their career) would pay a lot back on Plan 2, because their monthly payments would be significant but not enough to clear the loan.

Lower earners don't need to worry about the interest because many don't even pay off the loan let alone any interest. If you pay £50 a month, that's £600 per year, £6000 in a decade or £18000 across the whole 30 year period. So the interest could be a million pounds a year and you'd not pay a penny.

Very high earners pay a lot each month but less interest than the mid earners as they pay the loan down faster.

So if they recalculated the loans with the payment thresholds uprated with inflation each year as was originally implied, then the scandal would mostly go away and any remaining complaints are likely due to people not thinking through very basic maths.