University Fees

[Xenia]

I see that Lord Browne in his report may apparently suggest (Sunday Times today):

• rights for universities to charge fees of up to £10k a year rather than the £3200 or whatever it now is perhaps from 2012

• removal of cheap loans for children of the middle classes (presumably even if their parents are not prepared to help them)

• interest rate susidies on loans going up 2%

• students who go into high paid careers will have to pay back more than they borrowed perhaps capped at 20%

• and one which pleases me - parents will be able to avoid the graduate tax for their children if they pay the fees in advance. None of my older 3 children took out student loans as I paid as I wanted them to be in the same position when I graduated in the days when there were no fees paid by students.

However the report is not yet finished and he may recommend abolishing the cap on tuition fees and let the free market rule which may be wise.

'But he is in a small minority in very unusual circumstances surely.'

No, that's let them eat cake again. The reality is that it is a very small minority who have the support, financial and otherwise, to become doctors. This was always the case but is increasingly so.

And it could be something as simple as not being able to afford the tube ticket or bus ticket into a lecture or to have your laptop fixed or to pay the leccy bill that leads to a student dropping out.

If parents are past the threshold then they COULD help with any one of the above to prvent their child dropping out.

I haven't got exact figures obviously but as far as I can tell from the government funding website the full maintenance grant is approx 3K per year. So that's 9K less debt over three years. I'd call that fairly substantial.

And I know what you mean about doctors - I have friends who are doctors and they are the children of doctors and there is an unwritten expectation that their children will be doctors! It's the same with Law.

'Tim Crocker-Buqueof the BMA said just 4% of medical students came from the bottom two socio-economic groups, adding: "Fee exemptions for students living at home will not solve this problem as most medical students do not live within travelling distance of the 32 medical schools in the UK.'

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8160052.stm

Fellatio - you ain't wrong. If you are on a high income but refuse to contribute your dc just has to manage on the loans and any grant he would be entitled to if you ask for income assessment. If you refuse to be income assessed (which you can do) he gets the basic loans. You have to declare taxable interest but I expect there are ways to avoid having any.

But that's still fairly irrelevant. I'd be willing to bet that most parents of medical students would fork out AT LEAST £9000 a year to help support their child at university.

But even supposing that meant you left university with £10,000 debt instead of £19,000 that's still £10,000 of debt and I repeat

WHAT DO YOU LIVE ON IN THE MEAN TIME??

What do you do when your bank won't extend your overdraft and you can't afford your next meal/bus ticket/ text book?

That is what puts off poor students and that is what makes them drop out.

A very important question is what you live on whilst Student Finance continue to balls up the funding.

ds1 didn't get his until the end of November last year (from the middle of September) despite me applying very early. We had to bankroll him for 8 weeks. Had we not been able to do that he would have had to come home.

fivecandles I see what you are saying (I was in a similar situation myself as a student so I do know!) but then surely the answer is to raise the level of loans to a more reasonable amount for those who have to live on it in total, (not give them money)reduce the number of university places and focus on the truly academically able once again. With a weighting system perhaps for those students who show huge natural potential but have come from challenging backgrounds and may not have achieved their full potential at A level as a result. But treat everyone equally, i.e. as adults without an expectation of fincancial input from their parents.

And perhaps slightly different criteria should apply for medicine, (and any similar subjcts) where there is a both a longer and more intense period of study with more expensive fees and resources.

As I said you will NEVER account for the fact that some people have wealthier/more generous parents, so trying to manipulate eveyone's starting point just penalises parents who are not wealthy but who have been self-reliant. Their children do not derserve to go to uni less than the rich or the disadvantaged, though you'd be forgiven for thinking they do under the present system.

'I reckon most parents of medical students couldn't afford 9K a year for 6 years!'

Well, since 'just 4% of medical students came from the bottom two socio-economic groups' the evidence would suggest that they can!

'I was in a similar situation myself as a student '

Well, were you? I mean having to pay thousands of tuition fees but having no income for 5+ years as a medical student with no time to get a job with no financial assistance from parents? Because unless you were I really don't think you can know how hard it is. And things are bad enough now but they are going to get much worse.

Right, Fellat, so your solution is to let them incur even more debt!! And you think that will encourage more poor people to go?

By the way according to this article 'by next year the average debt incurred by a graduate of a five or six-year medical degrees will rise to an average of £37,000 by next year, with those in London paying as much as £67,000.'

www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/nov/04/medicine-tuition-fees-scholarships-university

What you're really sore about Felat is that the children of those parents who earn just over the threshold get up to £9000 less financial support than those who are under it.

But,

why do you think that the solution is to take away the support for everyone (when it is so clearly needed) rather than to raise the threshold thereby providing MORE support.

If we think more people go to university than really should then anything that puts them off might be all to the good and given the very poor get the most help those that perhaps need that leg up get it.

I've had 3 chidlrn thruogh unversity with friends on all sorts of financial arrangements and plenty even from well off families take a loan for all the fees work in term time (hard for medics but not impossible for other subjects with 4 hours of lectures a week - even my lot have worked at times in term time) and then all those long holidays. My older one worked a whole summer in the Caribbean and stuff like that. The problem in the last year though has been very few jobs for anyone because of the rececssion but recessions come and go and this one will be going before too long.

4 hours a week during term-time? Obviously not doing sciences then. Our students (not medical, but related science based) do 35 hours per week of lectures/labs and are expected to double this in their own time.

The med school argument is a bit bogus, though. Of all the careers that trivially offer a financial incentive to take on substantial debt, it's medicine. Even for people who don't make it to consultant and end up as staff grade Specialist Registrars, as is apparently becoming more common, it's a stable, well-paid job. For Consultants and GPs it is a stable and very well paid job, and the career pathways to Consultanthood are well mapped and open to most doctors.

The same's true for law and accountancy; once qualified, even people who don't go on to become heads of chambers are assured a stable middle-class income.

"and then all those long holidays. "

No for medics, though. See, for example here.

Unseen - Bristol and not science, the arts - one of my children.

Had to laugh at Xenia's idea that poor Londoners are working their manicures to the bone to subsidise the great unwashed masses of scots.

www.newstatesman.com/199911150028

Scotland contributes more to GDP than it takes out, roughly speaking. Ghat is very rare, the UK economy borrows every year to keep itself afloat.

The Scottish Goverment wants fiscal autonomy but for some reason Westminster is unwilling to allow this (I wonder why? See above)

I would also say that I don't see the Scots getting fat on their settlement. Well actually they are getting fat, but they are also dying young of poverty-related disease. In the east end of Glasgow, average life expectancy for a man is 57.

That said, the says of free tuition in Scotland are numbered I reckon.

There are more courses than just medicine which have very long hours. Most science degrees have long hours (mainly due to the amount of lab classes). Not all of these degrees lead to highly paid careers. However, at the moment, Britain is a world-leader in scientific research. In the past they were world-leaders in engineering. By not funding the next generation sufficiently, we are in danger that our abilities in science will go the same way as our abilities in engineering i.e. a thing of the past .

GAAAH! Sat here for flipping hours last night typing a very long and comprehensive answer to the points raised to me by fivecandle - then I hit send, and my laptop had gone off-line at midnight on a timer (unbeknownst to me DH had set it that way to deter the DCs from late night distractions) and it all got lost! I don't have time to do it all again now, but I'll be back later with the abridged FN mainfesto for funding, and my reasons.

Riven, exactly. Though it's not quite as badly paid as you'd suggest. I'm 10 years post PhD in academia and with a salary more than £40k, but this is probably not the norm.

However, we are short of good scientists (to the point where there are so few that science teaching in schools is degraded to a level where e.g. biology graduates are teaching chemistry). Science degrees are in general, hard work and the resultant careers are poorly paid. In spite of this at the moment, the UK is one of the world-leaders in scientific research. If even more people are dissuaded from doing a science degree due to high costs of doing the degree and low subsequent salaries, we will simply encourage students to choose subjects based on future earning power. This could potentially kill off one of the last remaining exportable commodities the UK has left.

There also seems to be a shortage of highly numerate graduates. DS1 worked for a financial services firm where pay was amazingly high for new graduates (think Riven's example of science pay but getting that amount at 21-22). They had difficulty recruiting new graduates with the skill/ability level they required.

Loads of people who are great a maths are employed in the City. A lot of trading is based on number stuff and analysis. All students know what pays and what doesn't and when they graduate they make choices and of course not everyone is motivated by pay. My daughter had friends going into fine arts, magazines, PR - very very low pay and others better paid stuff, even one into a £60k a year job on graduation.

Most of them know all about this - that some jobs are better paid than others, that some people are passionate about their subject even if it is badly paid and that some very well paid jobs do almost buy you body and soul of a period and plenty are prepared to make that pact with the devil as it were at least for a few years. Another advantage of long hours with high pay is you're not spending.

I'm trying to expain this to my son now Xenia - he's not money motivated yet but he doesn't realise he will be one day! He's looking at courses like philosophy and classic civilisation - all very interesting and all that, but not a huge call for philosophers last time I looked!

Some careers take any degree. One of my children's friend's read the same subject as her and went to work for a bank on graduation where he'd also spent a lot of university holidays working. She did something else after her non career specific degree and earns a reasonable amount. But it's up to them to choose making an informed choice.