How much to budget for a son starting UNI in 3 years time!

[booface]

I know that's looking a bit far ahead, but we are considering accepting a private school place for our second son who is 4 years younger and need to do the maths carefully!

I know the uni fees are £9k per year currently and most students borrow. But how much should be counting on for halls, food, travel, everything else really? DS 1 is thinking of medicine. Don't know where yet as way off in the future!

But would be really helpful to have an idea. I looked on the Oxford website and was rather shocked that it seemed to be around £12-£15k in addition to expenses.

I'm not really sure which is worrying as my dd is hopefuly starting university in Sept.

The general consensus seems to be that the basic maintenance loan is not high enough even to pay just the rent/cost of halls.
If parents earn over a certain amount (which isn't hard if you both work) then the amount they can borrow is restricted & parents are expected to top up.
From various threads here & talking to parents in RL, there seem to be two approaches - either pay for their accomodation & they try to pay for everything else with the loan/part time jobs. Or they use the loan to pay for most of the accommodation costs & parents give a weekly/monthly amount for everything else.

With the length of a medicine course you would have to be prepared for having your second child at uni at the same time too!

I give my DC around £12k a year on top of course fees and that covers everything. And that's in London.

My dc get 10k a year which covers everything, not in London though. Not looking forward to next year where I will have 3 of them in Uni last one will potentially be in London so may need more.

My dd tries to live off the minimum loan - so £3.6k. We pay her accommodation (£5k). She struggles though, so we help her out with books and travel, stuff like that. Most of her mates seem to be on similar.

The cost of accommodation varies as does the spending of the individual student.
Depending on your income they may get a maintenance loan as well as fees loan. About £10000 a year is a rough guide for living expenses. So even with the maximum loan, which many do not get, you still need to supplement them.

Don't most British students work as well? Are the holiday terms too restrictive to allow that?

The loan just about covered my dd's fees and accommodation and I gave her £300 a month to cover food, books and and modest entertainment. this was 6 years ago but probably still holds good. she was at a London uni

I think it depends on the course & so on whether it's feasible to work much. Many can work in the summer holidays only as the other holidays are too short or they have exams to study for. But some courses (eg medicine) don't get the summer off apart from the first year as they are on clinical placement.

It can be very difficult for students to find work especially if they're on a campus university. They are in very high demand.

escondida No, I think most don't work as well. Some courses don't leave much spare time. Also part time / term time work is not always easy to find. I asked DS if many people worked part time. He doesn't know anyone on his course or in his accommodation block who has a part time job, although several have some work in their home town they can go back to during holidays.

Boo there's some good information about this on another thread about private school fees. The thread went a bit OT towards the end.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/education/2317091-Private-School-fees-how-do-you-manage?

Wow, that's weird. Almost every American kid at Uni works. Even Ivy League expects you to work 4-15+ hours/week in term time and a lot more out of term.

Most of my dc's friends work too. All the way through holidays and very small jobs during term time.

In the USA though, the fees are way higher than here! So the need to work is more important.

Lots of students here do holiday jobs or work experience to help with future careers. A medical student would be very hard pushed to work in term time! It's a full on course. As for costs at university, London is more expensive, but you do get nearer £5000 for the living expenses loan. The cost of self catering halls can be £8000 plus though and then you need to budget for food, entertainment, travel etc. There are cheaper places such as Leeds and Manchester where the cost of halls is nearer to the loan, (the loan is lower) but you still need to find living expenses. We gave our DDs £450 a month in a catered hall and £600 a month in the non catered hall in London and made up the shortfall in rent.

as mmm quite rightly says it can vary quite substantially dependent upon location. Interestingly Oxford and Cambridge are among the cheapest - the breakdown of the £12-£15k would be interesting if you have a link to it, as for Oxbridge it seems rather on the high side. Shorter terms, relatively well appointed but reasonably priced college accommodation (available for all three years), heavily subsidised food, zero travel costs (when there), virtually zero book costs. DS at the latter, and it will be interesting to see what his first full year actually does cost - before he started conservative estimate against some of his other choices was that Cambridge was around £1500 a year cheaper on basic costs.

Does vary hugely on where they are studying.
ds is paying £82pw for his room (bills incl but not catered) whereas his girlfriend is paying £182 pw for hers, and ds says it's much smaller and nowhere near as nice as his. Well, start adding that up over 40 weeks....

Trouble with medicine as well, is that the course is very full on from the word go, so no chance to get a job to help out.

The 'how much do they need' is a bit of a how long is a piece of string question though - there are dozens and dozens of threads on this, and the amount varies HUGELY.

Just came back on thread. Thank you so much for all your replies. Really helpful and quite a reality check! I will see if I can find that link to Oxford halls costs.

www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/fees-and-funding/living-costs

Link here to Oxfords estimated living costs, and apologies, I think I probably added on too much for extras and 10k would be more like it.

thanks boo, its quite interesting to compare it with the Cambridge one

www.study.cam.ac.uk/undergraduate/finance/costs.html

As others say it is the "other costs" where there can be such huge variability - there is of course variability in accommodation but at least for halls it is published on Uni websites and you can get a feel for current rates, although expect them to in all likelihood increase faster than inflation over the next three years. Maybe best to plan on a range of better through to not so good case scenarios :)

In the USA though, the fees are way higher than here!

Er, no, not true. Maybe true at the high brand Universities which MNers like to pretend are the only ones that matter, but the cheaper places (like I went to and most people get their degrees from) or community colleges which suit the first 2 yrs of most degrees, the fees are far far below the cheapest Unis in UK. I won't even try to explain how much we pay for graduate education, too.

The difference is cultural. We reckon that you benefit so you earn to make it happen.

There's a huge history of entitlement and privilege attached to tertiary education in the UK. I wonder if maybe it's a form of trickle down theory.

I don't know what I think about govt. targets on how many go to Uni. It's such a controlled system here that there's no natural balance in what happens. 20% sounds way too elitist for me (especially if those elite were the only ones with option of an extra £30k spent on their training & education).

Lots of students do holiday jobs but lots of students do actually work in term time at their subjects and have labs, reading to do, research, deadlines, clubs and sport etc. A full time degree from a good university should keep you busy. Also a few hours a week at £7 an hour will not get you very far unfortunately. My DD got a place at a US university and that was $40,000 a year just for tuition! I guess it was a big name!