Oh my GOD - university - how the hell are we going to afford this?

[ElizabethMyDear]

I feel a bit sick - DS submitted his UCAS today, and I just looked at the government website about loans and grants. DH and I both work full time, so I knew he wouldn't get a grant, but for maintenance he can only take out a loan of £4788 - that probably won't even cover his rent.

His cousin in his first year at uni gets close to ten thousand a year to live on with grants, loans, and bursery, because his parents both only work very part time hours. I knew we wouldn't get money given like that, but I thought he would be able to borrow the same amount as his cousin gets - I thought it was the same for all students, and varied in how much you have to pay back?

We've got three other kids, no way can we find a spare £5k a year to top him up. And his course (medicine) is really too intensive for him to have a term time job.

He's screwed, isn't he?

Yes, I think I gave the figures. The loan covers the £9k a year fees and the maintenance bit you can get is just under £5k. Most students also work. I think with your work and the £5k you can usually cover rent, food and travel reasonably well. If a parent also contributes that of course makes it easier.

I suspect someo of my children adored few contact hours - I heard one takling about 3 hours of lectures a week nd that was a bonus from her point of view (and she i s still doing pretty well at work despite that lack of contact) >I suspect the lack of university contact hours gives you much more time to make contact in traditional student ways with your hobbies and pleasures and contacts and thoughts of work - although I am sure that is not quite what parents feel they want for the children.

£3.5k is quite a lot less than £5k xenia and in most cases won't cover accommodation costs. That is all the maintenance loan that a child with well off parents can get these days. It's not that these parents are paying some of the loan for their children (which would be a bit daft, as they will quite possibly end up paying no more back even if they take a larger loan), it's that the children of better off parents are only allowed to take up 65% of the loan than other children are allowed. As even the full 5k loan isn't enough to live on without earning extra from part-time jobs in many university towns, having to find the extra 35% of the standard loan as well as the extra needed on top of the loan does put some students in a very difficult position. If parents can't or won't top up they will struggle, especially if they can't get or aren't allowed to have term time employment.

Quite a few get the maximum loan rates below and some get part of it as a total gift by way of bursary if the parent is poor.

Very few students don't work so they will have this plus their earnings. A good few are lucky to have parents who help too but I thin you can manage without that if you have to. Many live at home too.

"Maximum Maintenance Loan rates for full-time students
Where you live and study Maintenance Loan
You live at home £4375
You live away from home and study outside London £5500
You live away from home and study in London £7675

www.direct.gov.uk/en/EducationAndLearning/UniversityAndHigherEducation/StudentFinance/Typesoffinance/DG_171539

Sorry Xenia, this thread isn't about people eligible for the maximum loan. It's about people eligible for only the minimum loan (65% of the max), ie: £2843 (live at home); £3575 (live away from home not in London); or £4988 (London).

The 'live away from home, not in London' rate is not enough for most parts of UK. To make this up to the circa £9k that is suggested one needs to live on students need to earn an extra £5.5k which is 21 hours per week (every week of the year) on minimum wage. Simply not possible at oxbridge or on demanding courses like medicine as the OP was talking about.

What income level would only qualify for the reduced loan? Surely parents on such an income level would make sure their over 18, who is studying, is fed whilst away from home. It must be a small minority who wouldn't help out if they could. Had they had this attitude a couple of years earlier then they wouldn't be still living with their kids as it would be neglect.

Ok, legally they don't have to help and I think universities would have some sort of provision if a student can prove they have no money to eat whilst looking for a job. They have hardship funds.

No one is saying they won't help Tressy just that its difficult!

It's no more difficult that it's always been. Tuition fees apart.

I cannot help mine as I have just enough income (well below average) to cover my living expenses, cb and tax credits were a lifeline when she was at home. If I earned a couple of grand a year more I would easily be able to give DD enough money to feed herself.

Yes, that's true

"All students from England studying a first undergraduate degree,
regardless of their level of household income can receive a basic
maintenance loan of £3,575 per annum."

So if you are reasonabnly well off you borrow £3575 and your parent coudl make it up to £5500 £1925 difference = £37 a week. Or you earn it or in most cases a bit of both as has been said rent is likely to be fairly high.

In my day if you were middle income you got not a penny loan or gift for maintenance and either your parents paid or you paid yourself or you didn't go.

Manchester suggests

Estimated Living Costs
(based on 2011/12 figures)
Undergraduate
(40 weeks)
Accommodation* (an average cost for selfcatering
halls)
£4,200

Meals (based on a budget of £35 per week) £1,400
Books and Stationery £375
Clothes £375
Local transport £500
Other general living expenses
(e.g. photocopying and printing, laundry,
phone calls, consumables, entertainment,
sports, cooking equipment etc)
£1,390

Total £8,240

www.eee.manchester.ac.uk/pdf/undergraduate/Student-Finance-2012-entry.pdf

The problem is not with the rich or the poor, but the squeezed middle.

The problem is not particularly with London, but with provincial universities.

My DS1 is in London, and he gets a bigger loan (£5000), and has a wide choice of accomodation. He doesn't have day-to-day transport costs, and the supermarket costs are the same as anywhere.

DS2 is in Bristol. His loan is ?£3500. He has no choice over halls, which cost £4200.

DS1 has shared room, no bathroom; DS2 has single ensuite. DS2 didn't have a choice of cheaper accomodation, so has to pay the higher rate.

We are paying DS2's hall costs, and he will use his loan to pay for everything else. Not sure how the figure of £9000 is worked out.

Having had both DSs home for the summer, and both of them gone now, I do realise that they eat a lot while they are here, so that is a savings for us.

Both boys were in private school at around £17000 pa. We are saving quite a bit now.

I am of the camp that believes they should be responsible for their own higher education, so should take maximum loans. I do believe that students have needed loans for many years now, so there should be no surprise to parents.

I was at university in the mid-80s when the grant system started to shift. When I started my degree, the grant ranged from £410 - c£1500. Midway, it shifted to £205 minimum and I think it went to zero shortly thereafter. Clearly, parents needed to make a contribution. You have to be a very naive parent to be taken by surprise by this nowadays.

The fees situation is relatively new, but this is all covered by loans, so no one should be put off doing a lucrative course.

Well count me in as naive then. I had assumed that a loan, since it is repaid (unlike a grant which they had in my day) would cover all (albeit modest) costs.
It is repaid, so why not allow students to borrow what they need as independent adults? Why are parents expected to make up the difference?
We will have three at uni, we have modest incomes, a mortgage to pay, pensions to contribute to etc etc. We were hoping to pay off our mortgage by the time we retire but it looks like this won't be possible now.

We could never have afforded private education for them, I can see how, if we had, it would have been just an expense continued for longer.

You can probably shave a couple of thousand pounds of the figures given by Manchester Uni (see Xenia's post above). The cheapest self catering accomodation at Manchester is just over £3200 per 40 week contract rather than the 'average' cost of £4200 and I am sure you could save on your general and travel costs if you really had to. Privately rented accommodation is often cheaper still.

However you look at it, it is still a lot of money.

As I said in an earlier post you can definitly work while you study if you are doing medicine (probably with the exception of Oxbridge)

The loan system is extremely generous - most women in particular will have a large chunk written off - and that's why the Treasury won't let all students borrow as much as they'd like to.

I agree the entire system has been very badly explained, but actually the assumption that dual income parents will subsidise their children's living expenses has been in place for decades.

I suppose parents are expected to make up the difference because not all these loans will be repaid, and the bad debts are covered by the taxpayer.

I agree, Dilys, about the need for parents to support their children having been there for a long time. I was at university in the 80s and got well below the full maintenance grant, which was means-tested. My parents were not on high salaries, so the means-testing can't have been that generous (although of course the whole system of grants and no fees was munificent compared with the loan system in place now). They topped my grant up to the maximum out of their own after-tax income. At a time when few young people went to university that was a significant extra expense for them. Lots of my contemporaries would have been working at my age and either living at home and paying rent or living away from home and self-supporting. Different times.

I totally agree asheep. that is my take on the situation. we could never afford private ed for ours and we have 3, so why are we suddenly expected to top up our dds university costs.

I think the student loan should be more generous regardless of parents income and if they don't pay it back, so what. I am sure most of them will and their parents and forefathers have been taxed to death over the centuries.

In the 80s I got no grant at all due to parental income and my parents paid it all. This is not new. In the 1940s my father couldnt' do medicine as his first degree as his fatehr had already funded his brother in it (long course, expensive) so he did a science degree first. Then luckily post war grant funding came in and after 3 year degree he moved on to 6 or 7 years doing medicine. My mother though says she supported him from her wages during this student years so I bet the grants in the 1940s were not that generous.

The UK has moved to a country of total takers who think the state will provide everythning on a plate. It is rather good now to see that Labour brought in these university fees and the gravey train has stopped and student children or their parents might actually have to fork out for something which others who do not go to unviersity are in part funding and from which thes tudent will benefit for 40 years of wages thereafter. When something is for nothing peoople don't appreciate it. We need to change this take take take culture.

So the Bristol example his hall fees are about £1k less than the loan he can take out but also remember it is possbile to get interest free over drafts and also bank loans as a student too plus most of them work so even without parental help it is not too bad. Also some children are just so spoiled htey think things like trips out to eat are necessities when plenty of us at university were used to having a potato for a meal. Scottish students used to take a sack of oats to university as their food for the term. A bit of austerity and suffering for these students is no bad thing and if their mothers are forced out to full time work like the rest of us have to do to fund it it will do those mothers the world of good.

My DCs received the lower unassessed maintenance loan, and I've topped this up (and more) just as my parents topped up my maintenance grant. I've also been in the position to pay their tuition fees in full (fortunately they started university before the rate went up to £9k). But it has always seemed strange that parents are pretty well expected to make up the difference/support their adult children but have no rights to receive any information concerning their academic performance.

Lm, I agree. In theory a university could have the student when they enter sign to say yes I am happy for my parents to be told all (and indeed one of mine chose to give me access to their university work emails but that is very rare indeed and I am not saying it is at all necessary in most cases). There was a mumsnet thread a year or so ago when the poor mother did not even know if her child was still at Oxford.

Xenia if their mothers are forced out to full time work like the rest of us have to do to fund it it will do those mothers the world of good.

That is the opposite of what is happening. We both work FT, so our kids have to pay their own way, plus extra to fund the "poor" students. Their cousin was a "poor" student because her mother sits on her backside rather than go out to work, and her father who earns easily 3 times our joint income doesn't have his income taken into account. So she got everything handed to her on a plate while ours had to work.

Why should the children of a couple who both work, and have stayed together, be treated less favourably than those of people who choose not to work/ to work PT?

The difference is just about £1900 I thought though? About £3,500 loan if you are rich or £5000 part loan part gift if you are better off and in work. I would have thought a woman working full time is much better off for all kinds of reasons than that mere £1900 difference surely?

As I read it both parents income is taken into account. None of the students fees go to "poorer" students, poorer students fees etc. are funded via loans, and possible grants (funded by tax) or bursaries which tend to be funded by the donations of alumni, which is why richer Universities can be more generous.
Also beware of bragging on the student room, as with most things on the Internet it isn't necessarily true. When I went to university back in the dark ages there were students who liked to brag how they or their family had fooled the system into giving them a full grant. However I also met people who were very poor because their parents had split and the wealthy one refused to fund them (probably showing the abuse behind the parental split).

Xenia, it's about £7500 in loan and grant together for the 'poorest' families, plus bursary, which can bring it up to about 10k. Whether the income level is caused by low wages, divorce, or parents just not feeling like working very much, thanks.

It's a system which positively discourages work.

And absent parent's income is not taken into account, however a stepparent's is, (or mum's partner) even if this person has never been responsible for their support in any way before.

I find it impossible to believe someone can live on £25 a week in London. That is not doable at all, it is silly to spread this sort of nonsense. A weekly travel card is at least that much. £5 a week on a phone and a bare minimum of £3 a day on food. Also entertainment? You are looking at £50 as a basic ifestyle. If your dc tells you they are managing on that, they are lying and incurring debts.

We took the out of London figures above 0 except on the chart giving in the in and out of London figures.

Anyway many students do manage. Most graduate with over draft debt as well as student loan and most have jobs too.

I certainly am not suggesting it is fair that the poor get a bit more. I think it is ridiculous to suggest a very bright teenager from a poor home should be more put off by student debt they only repay when they reach an income of a certain level and never repay if they never reach that level, than someone from a middle income family. Tyey have eyes. they have brains. They can do internet searches kjust as well as someone whose mother earns £20k so why do we say poor little dears, you will be put off by debt much more than a middle income family so we will give you some of the money rather than lend it to you. it's very wrong. Let us lobby against any kind of bursaries at all given the inherent unfairness in the system.