to not fund ds further education

[frazzled74]

we have a moderate income which allows us to pay mortgage etc and have 1 holiday per year plus a few day trips etc, but no savings. ds 17 will be going to uni next year. we also have a 7 and 4 year old.
am i being unreasonable to expect ds to take student loan to cover tuition and accomodation costs etc.Some of my friends are talking about taking on second jobs and remortgaging to help finance uni. I think this would be detrimental to rest of family (not enough equity anywayto remortgage)
I was hoping that ds would find part time /holiday work to minimise his borrowing and that i woud be on hand with food parcels, train fares etc. I know that its hard that students end up with masses of debt but is it that awful?

You would also have to warn your DS that I drive a bashed up old Skoda. He might prefer to take a coach...

I have just checked the directgov website about student loans.

We earn well above all the threshholds for CTC etc, but DS could take out a maintenance loan of £5000 for London, and a loan to cover his fees. This is a better situation than I thought

Accommodation will be around $4000, so between the leftover loan, whatever DS can earn, we should only have to top him up a smallish amount - much less than what he costs us right now.

YANBU. It's not as if you are rich and refusing to do it. If your financial position improves, you could maybe contribute towards the repayments. That would probably be a lot easier than shelling out three years of living costs in a lump sum anyway. The loans do go up, but only in line with inflation. But you shouldn't feel obliged.

when I was a student we lived frugally. These days they expect to eb out on the beers every nght, then have the cheek to complain that they are 20k in debt at the end of thioer course.

That does vary though Riv

Where Dhj's Uni is, in the valley, most of them would need to work in cardiff I guess.... there is a train dstation at the Uni but I ahve no idea how useful tehya re if you are working in a pub or funny hours (I can guess though). Students on thinsg like teaching and pgce or nursing can also need them for getting about, when i looked at PGCE they told me they could place me anywhere between somerset and birmingham from Bristol, or at carmarthen anywhere in south wales!.