Saving for university ?

[HoopyFroodDude]

Are you saving for your children to go to university ? If so do you mind me asking how much?

I have not planned for this but have been inspired by another thread about university debt to start. Do you have any tips ?

mublechum that is a good idea.

i doubt many in the real world could afford to save 60k

Seriously this is a new idea that parents are expected to pay for their adult children's education.
The more we do the more the government will expect us to do, we should push back and say that since the government will benefit from the higher taxes graduates will pay then they should cover those on low incomes with grants and everyone else just gets a free university education assuming they a) get the required grades and b) are doing something worthy of a degree.
That would put an end to the likes of hotel management requiring a degree at entry level and young people starting their lives £30k in debt.

Any government will not go back to the way it was-and fees will just get more and more expensive. I wonder when people are paying school fees if they have have considered the cost later on.

I agree.

With all the planned cuts, see they have already started on state schools, I am concerned about rising fees. Reckon if things continue it will be very difficult for students from low income families to go to university no matter how much potential they may have.

I would suggest get saving asap.

my parents helped me out with my postgraduate degree - there was no funding available for that but it did lead me directly into the career i'm in now.

i am sooo glad they were able to help but i never took it for granted that they would for a second.

in return now i have a decent job i have not allowed them to pay for my wedding.. they should keep their money for retirement... they want to pay for our honeymoon and i'll accept a small amount as a present but that's all.

i think there's never any harm in saving if you can afford to. i am saving now for mat leave, i might not need the money but i'll have it if i do. DP has an endownment wchich will be kept for 'just in case' which might be university, or it might be earlier if we run into hard times while the children are young (e.g. redundancy) or it might be kept till later if our children don't need it for uni.

DH abd I opened an ISA each and we also had some other savings that we used for DD1 who is now 23 and married so when she did a PGCE last year we didn't have to fund that. Curently funding DD2 we psid £5000 for halls last year and I also bought her a few bits and pieces. She got a tution and a student maintenace loan which she used for everything else. She has just started sharing a house with some friends she had £500 from her late Grandfather which she used for the deposit and some of the rent she has now got a job so she can pay the rent during the summer but we will help her from September not sure how much though,

"Reckon if things continue it will be very difficult for students from low income families to go to university no matter how much potential they may have" This worries me as well.

It feels as though we are going backwards. Not only will it be harder to get good grades in respected exams in the state system but even if you do you won't be able to afford to go to university anyway. I don't think it will just be low income families I think a lot of middle income families will be hit hard as well.

'this is a new thing adults being expected to pay for children's education'
er, no, in the days of the means-tested grant, parents' income was assessed and they were then told what their parental contribution was expected to be - they were expected to make up the difference to the full grant level. (Ok, so it was maintenance only, not fees, and not all parents paid it, but it was very explicit). My parents paid me the equivalent of the full grant and expected me to live on it.

Am I right in thinking that in America they have to pay for university but there are lots of scholarships available? We don't have that here either do we?

Yes that's right Hoopy. DH is American hence why we have started saving because that's just the mentality he has grown up with; parents save from a very early age to afford college fees. There are a lot more scholarships but of course you can't bank on your child getting one so you have to save anyway.

£100/month saved for each child since birth plus additions with gift money from relatives for birthdays/Christmas.

Should have approximately £25k per child which will help but won't fund it all.I expect to supplement this.

I didn't come out of University with debt but worked all my holidays and my parents helped me despite not being on a high income so I expect to do the same for my children.

My children will be expected to find holiday/weekend jobs also to fund university.

Whether you save depends on your means really but if you can obviously it will help your children not to come out of their degree course with a large debt.

Yes of course parents income was considered when allocating grants but that's entirely different from expecting parents to actually fund the education.
I feel at 18 my children are independent adults, unless they are going to continue to pay child benefit to me then financially they are off my hands so to speak.

Hoopy there are scholarships and bursaries now, but as yet they're not sufficiently large to make a difference to, say, accommodation cost or tuition fees for a year - or at least the ones that are are few and far between. That may change if tuition fees are allowed to rise beyond what they are now.
Look out for the results of the Browne Review into university funding out this Autumn. That will affect people going to university in 2012 and thereafter. If he agrees that tuition fees should rise, IMHO the Student Loans Company will have to put a cap on how much they are prepared to lend for tuition fees because the government can't afford a massive loan book. So, a consequence of higher fees could be that students who want to study a popular course at a good university may have tuition fees of, say, £7,000 with a government subsidized student loan up to a maximum of £5,000. Who bridges the gap? Or, does a child who (or whose parents) can't afford to pay the extra then just go to a lesser university or a local one to keep costs down, or put off going for a couple of years? I think we're going to go right back to children having to be born into rich families in order to be able to reach their full potential .

Start saving now. Never too late. I've been (more or less) putting the child benefit away since they were born - what you don't have you don't miss, and all that.

sigh .. We really are going backwards. People would have to me mega rich to fund private education and then all that for university as well.

I had a couple of jobs at university and rarely went out etc but I did have a full grant. It was still hard.

I am even more worried now. I am going to do some serious planning. Thanks for all the advice.

I'm delighted to help my children to university and don't want them off my hands at 18. I've paid DS1's tuition fees for his undergraduate degree and given some further maintenance support to him as his non-means assessed loan would not even cover the rent for his halls of residence.
I and DH benefitted from our parents willingness to make up our means tested grants,so I wouldn't be happy if we didn't do the same for our children.
Fortunately our joint salaries are enough to manage to do this, only sacrificing unnecessary expenditure such as expensive holidays and new furniture/cars etc. But it isn't much fun for students whose families can't help at all and who will rack up much higher debts with no guarantee of a good job at the other end.

Mamatomany, "parents income was considered when allocating grants but that's entirely different from expecting parents to actually fund the education." Means-testing is means-testing. If you base funding on how much your parents earn, the assumption is that their wealth(!) is yours and that they will meet any shortfall. Like it or not, the government is treating HE as something that students and their families should pay for. It's a nasty game to have to go along with, but if you don't you risk your child not being able to study what they want to study where they want to study it. Maybe that's a luxury - to me it's about fulfilling potential and believing the state has some investment in that.

Hoopy - I say that because on the whole an independent education really is a very good all-round education (for life, as well as academically). A university education might be marvellous - but it is all too often a waste of time and money. Sadly. I taught so many students who really would have been better getting a job and some 'proper' training at 18 rather than saddling themselves with debts in order to get an essentially worthless 2.2. Many of these students are still unemployed now (and I taught a 'proper' subject at a Russell Group university).

It will not be good for the country.

We will be in a situation where many of the brightest and best may never go to university.

Re the report affecting 2012 intakes, which is DD's year, oh how I wish they would look into giving more help to students from low incomes. Wishful thinking I'm sure.

If they did increase fees and more people decided it's not worth it then surely the universities are going to struggle. Our county has given some of the colleges university status recently and it's already running into financial difficulty.

we are saving £100 each for our 4 children, so £400 per month in their child trust fund each month.

It won't be huge amounts by the time they're 18 it will be about 20k each. But with 4 kids that's all we can afford and that will be our contribution to their future after 18.

I just hope they don't blow it!!!

Lilymaid I don't want them off my hands in terms of supporting them emotionally but there comes a point where financially the government requires them to pay council/income tax, stops my child benefit, holds them responsible for their debts and yet when it comes to educating them they are still my child and financially dependent
Are people allowing for the fact that you are only allowed to gift so much per year tax free and that the interest on all these funds will also attract tax too.
Talk about a double whammy.
I just wonder what would happen if we all refused to fill out the parental income forms. Look at the poll tax when enough people refused to pay they scrapped it.

My child has been told that she is not going to university (since being a baby!!!)

I can not afford for her to go and I really wouldn't advise her to start her adult life £30k in debt.

Any other adult over the age of 18 without an income would be given non refundable benefit and I presume HB if they had to leave home so it doesn't seem fair that someone who wants to better themselves through uni are made to live off loans or parents.