How much do I need to save for Uni per child?

[cheapandchic]

Can anyone give me a realistic figure for university, including housing and food and such? At the moment my kids are young, but living in London I can't seem to save a penny. Hopefully things will get better but I need to have a rounded figure in mind as a goal to save for each child.

BTW I know a few from my class who's now not paying and living in the US.

Actually it's not only about the pay. It's also the career. There are no exciting engineering jobs in NZ. They are all working in support for telecoms and power utilities companies. While the ones overseas are employed by the likes of Google.

Lilymaid I thought that means testing the parents' income was to see if you were eligible for a full maintenance grant whilst in HE not for paying actual university tution costs from a parental income. I received a full grant but DH wasn't eligible for one but none of our parents paid for the cost of the university course that was funded by the LEA

DS we are already saving for, assuming that £9k will rise by about 6% every year. Meaning by the time he hits 18, the fees alone will be £19,200. Per year. Ouch.

If he chooses medicine/dentistry/vetsci, we are looking at £108K for the 5 years. Plus maintenance.

bakingaddict
Back in the days of grants parental income was assessed for the maintenance part of the grant. The LEA paid the fees (which were very low - £80 pa back in the 1970s). Not sure what happened before the grant system. On honours boards in schools I recall mention of "major county scholarship" or "minor county scholarship". If you didn't win a scholarship either from the LEA or the university and your parents couldn't help you out, you couldn't go to university.

What is happening from this September is paying for tuition fees - that is what the £6-9000 covers, putting universities and students in a direct customer relationship. Teaching costs used to be covered by central govt. Previously, parents might have been liable only for maintenance depending on income.

tuition fees have been charged since at least 2001, telsa - though they were only just over £1000 at that point. They've been at £3000+ for the last 5 years or so

\link{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuition_fees_in_the_United_Kingdom\details on wiki}

£3000 tuition started in 2004

For my current two at uni, it costs about £12k per year each on current fees - so would be £15k on new fees next year.

This assumes they live at home in the hols and we pay their food bills. In practice they'd both work the summer and earn a few £00s to cover a holiday, clothes, seeing friends etc

They get their fees covered by a loan - currently £3k will be £9k for new students from this year. They also get a maintence loan of £3k ish each which is less than their accomm for each of them. We make up the rest of their living expenses which in practice is about £400 a month for each of them ( 12 months for one of them in. 12 month let, 9 months for the other in 9 mth uni accomm)

what I mean is that from September the complete tuition fees are now paid by students - previously govt supplied the majority of teaching funding for each student. Now they provide none - except paradoxically through loans (privatised debt) - 30% of which they assume will never be paid back.

tesla
you need to backtrack quite a lot further as you are still talking &&&&

The tuition cost of courses varies massively - and most technical subjects cost a lot more than the upper fee limit and wiffly arts ones less
if you look at what overseas students are charged THEN you will see what the true tuition fees are
and the RG Unis will continue to cross subsidise teaching and research as they have always done

Actually, the government will still be funding a proportion of undergraduate teaching costs in the so called band a and b subjects (clinical subjects malus lab based subjects, broadly). They will no longer provide a per student contribution to the old band c and d subjects (mixed teaching such as Maths and geography and art, and en the classroom based humanities).

So there will still be government funding for teaching. The reason being it costs more than £9k per year to teach a medical student or a chemistry student. But not, generally, more than that to teach a French or history student.

And as for cross subsidising teaching with research funding, actually, historically, the funding went the other way - teaching massively subsidised research until about 10 years ago but it's been moving to a More balanced funding approach for the last 10 years.

forgot I was only talking about Arts, Hums and Social sciences - but ti is where I am based, so it tends to loom large.

Nikolai Tesla was one of the greatest inventors and experimenters in science and technology

Except our fellow poster's name is Telsa, not Tesla! :o

Lol
you read what you want to see
I'll get back under my electrically charged rock :-)

My dd will be able to corrow £3500 oer year maintenance, and the interest while she is at university (hopefully 4 years) rises this year from very little to RPI plus 3%. That's currently an interest rate of 8.2%. Not great.

Leaving aside her course fees of 9k pa, her outgoings start with hall fees of around 6k pa (catered). You can see how the problem starts.

I'm pretty boringly middle class and avoided anti-Thatcher marches as a student myself, but am starting to feel very militant on behalf of so many people.

Just to get the facts right...

The student loan will pay for all tuition fees and will cover living costs up to £4375 for students living with their parents, £5500 for most students and £7675 for students in London (these are all annual figures). The actual maximum size of the loan for living costs depends on the parents' income - the student will receive at least 65% of this figure but if the parents' income is below £62,500 they will get more. Tuition fees are covered in full regardless of the parents' income.

Students from households where the residual income (in broad terms this is income before tax but after pension contributions) is below £42,600 receive a grant of up to £3250 towards their living costs in addition to the loan, although the maximum loan is reduced a little. So if the household's residual income is less than £25,000 a student will receive a grant of £3250 and a loan of £3875 giving a total of £7125 towards their living costs assuming they are living away from home and studying outside London. The grant does not have to be repaid ever.

Students will NOT be paying the loan off for the rest of their lives. They won't pay anything unless their income is at least £21,000 per annum. The amount they pay depends entirely on how much they earn, not how much they owe. Any outstanding balance on the loan is written off after 30 years.

The net effect of the recent changes is that new graduates earning £21,000 or more will pay £540 per year less than under the old system. They will, however, be paying for longer and students on higher incomes will pay more in total, but students on lower incomes will pay less in total.

Student loans do not go on credit files unless the student defaults on the loan. Mortgage lenders say it will not affect students ability to get a mortgage, although it may reduce the amount they can borrow a little.

To all intents and purposes this is a graduate tax with a cap.

To answer the original question, how much you need to save depends on your income. If you earn over £62,500 per annum, for example, your child will only receive 65% of the maximum loan for living costs and will not be eligible for any grant, although their tuition fees will still be paid in full. You therefore need to think about saving enough to cover that gap.