Augar report: lower university fees, return of grants etc

[whistl]

Has anyone been hearing the news today about the newly published Augar report?

Well if people don’t factor this in when making decisions about children it’s not really possible for the lowest paid in society to cough up the costs for your DC via tax. Many earn less than £60,000 combined and pay tax which subsidises students of whom 65% never will pay off all of it. Parents have to pay and years ago you would have paid too! DH’s parents worked in a factory and part time as an accounts clerk. They were asked to contribute. Hardly great incomes.

The students whose parents don’t or won’t pay, have to get a job! No change there either. DH did when his parents didn’t pay. They bought a colour TV and a caravan instead. Choices in life are not always satisfactory!

Mine didn’t actually and were on a perfectly good income. My mum didn’t even work.When the loans came in we could all borrow the same.

2 x teachers aren’t rich.When parents don’t pay which clearly is an issue some unis have a no work policy so they’re screwed.Those students who have to work and are allowed to are disadvantaged whilst taking their degree through no fault of their own. It’s much harder to do a demanding degree and work.Their parents are paying tax to fund other students’ loans it’s incredibly unfair their kids can’t take the full amount out too.

It’s a ludicrous system.

Didn’t Martin Lewis say he wouldn’t lower tuition fees, or bring back maintenance grants but boost maintenance loans instead?

Isn’t this the exact opposite?

The grants are £3k and then the student can still borrow the balance by way of maintenance loan up to what their maintenance loan would have been so less borrowing.

Students have always been "poor" even when they had jist grants. Students can generally get jobs over holidays to boost their accounts.

There will always be someone who is better off. A student not from a rich family but whose parent has scrimped and saved so they can support their child through uni, a traditionally wealthy family who says up to you now.

The reality is there are ways to go to uni of you really want to.

Martin Lewis accepts that lowering fees by £1750 a year and giving a £3k grant as part of the maintenance that doesn't need to be repaid merely reduces the borrowing.

What puzzles me is the number of people hand wringing that it only benefits mid to high earners, confusing this with the parents/family being mid to high earners now! It means the student's potential earning and surely as they go off to uni their aspiration is to be just that.

“Generally” what does that mean? You need more guarantee than generally when you’ve committed to years of debt.

So all degrees require zilch of you over the holidays?Its easy to get full time work for 6-8 weeks? There would be very little chance here and with no spare car little chance of getting there. Public transport is shite and expensive.Many parents work through the holidays so can’t play taxi cab. No point paying rent elsewhere and doing a minimum wage job,you wouldn’t break even.

I could always afford to eat and pay for heating. Many aren’t now, hence Martin Lewis’s concern. They are 18 years old on the lowest of the lowest income. Why is it character building and ok for one section of society to struggle and go hungry but not ok for another?

If Im paying taxes I expect my dc to get the same as every other kid ie access to the full maintenance loans. Other countries look after their students.

With 3 to pay for for 2 of the years I honestly think we’d be better off reducing hours to get under the threshold. £30k maintenance bill we’ll have is more than the salary that tips you over the threshold. It’s insanity.

It sounds worse than currently as you pay for longer and start sooner.

The current system is free if you never earn over £25k as long as you can pay your rent and live on the maintenance loan.

What puzzles me is the number of people hand wringing that it only benefits mid to high earners, confusing this with the parents/family being mid to high earners now! It means the student's potential earning and surely as they go off to uni their aspiration is to be just that.

Not always. There will be a lot of students who go to university to do courses such as nursing where most graduates are never going to be high earners and quite possibly not mid earners.

I agree with extending the term before the debt is written off. If you cannot pay the debt through earnings, the debt should be paid off when you die from your estate.

As it stands, someone can take a university education (and post graduate) and always sail under the payment threshold or never work at all. Dh's niece has had nearly ten years of higher education and has now got married and is a SAHM as her dh earns a lot. She says she is intending never to repay her loan.

Nothing wrong with not paying it back irma. The system was designed with the assumption that half would never be paid back and funded accordingly.

Nothing wrong with not paying it back irma.

Completely disagree, there's a lot wrong with not paying it back. It screws over others who might be able to change their life through HE, if only there were more money available.

HE policy wonk here, if anyone has AMA style questions

If you're a policy wonk you'll know that the loan system is predicated around a 60% RAB charge, and that overall spending on HE, even if less than 40% of loans are repaid, has not changed since 2012, is not likely change following Augar, so no one in the future will be prevented from going because current grads aren't earning enough to pay back their loans.

An AMA - what do you think about the 1.2 max repayments, and what do you think about the proposal to remove Foundation year funding and do you think price group D unit of resource will remain the same?

In Scotland you start paying back after £17,000.

My mistake, its £18K and they're planning on putting it up to £25K over the next few years. The term is 30 years though.

Relatives in the US started looking at college fees from the moment their children were born. Regular savings - and once the DC were old enough weekend and vacation jobs with most of the money going into college fund.

Many (though not all) British families could adopt this attitude and save to meet some of the up front costs of university education.

The situation with unpaid student loans in the USA is a ticking time bomb though. The student loan debt crisis is about to get worse.

Many nurses and teachers are in a very good situation in their working lives. They don’t need stellar A levels to get into their careers and there are loads of jobs, especially for nurses. Some teachers go on to be heads and deputies in secondary schools earning £75,000 plus. It’s not a dead end job if you get promotion and quite a few teachers I know are on in excess of £40,000 fairly quickly and they are not SLT. Nurses can also earn well and a few will earn a lot. I also don’t see why they shouldn’t have a loan like everyone else as they have pretty good job security too. Vets are also poorly paid when starting out! Look at the A levels they need and competition is stiff to get on the courses.

I’m surprised that people don’t think about university costs for DC many years earlier. I don’t think there is much evidence DC don’t go to university if both parents are teachers. Earning £60,000 for two teachers with 3 children seems quite low from my knowledge as a school governor.

It is important that DC make informed choices if they want a very high paying job. The best universities and sought after courses are still the route to better money. Also in y2, students usually rent for 50 weeks. Stay in the university city and work there!

There is only so far one can go in the pursuit of Swedish state service levels at American tax levels, and we have been at/past the limit for too long. HE is a lower priority than say Health, the latter despite not being cut even in real terms is beset by burgeoning demand, so they are very short, too.

Education is paid for by taxpayers, and when HE was 'free' to students, the system restricted access and relied on the chosen few to repay these in future taxes (some of whom appear to resent doing so, for their own children). Charging HE fees opened up access, however taxpayers still have to pay for it upfront, but some people seem to want other taxpayers to pay for them and not have to repay these advances when they leave education and work. Why expect to benefit from the state but not pay your taxes to support future generations? That's grabby and frankly dishonest.

Whenever people say that services and benefits of any kind are inadequate, they are either asking for the higher tax rates to fund these higher service and benefit levels, or expecting to take from the system without giving. Whatever level HE fees are set, the numbers will have to balance out over time. Nobody makes changes unless the current fee/tax levels are unsustainable. No matter how loudly and bitterly you complain, you still have to live within your means. Asking others to support a system that you want only to extract from basically means you don't wish to be part of our system of privileges and responsibilities. If you hadn't realized what the system is, some maturity and ownership looks to be called for.

It is not possible to square the no fees mantra and no parental payments mantra. This was never the case for many when it was deemed to be free. It never was free. Low paid tax payers were paying for wealthy students because it was good for the country. It is highly possible there are too many degree level courses and perhaps nursing should revert back to non degree. Plenty of other degrees could be converted back and training take place at colleges of HE that all became universities. They were so much cheaper to run and certainly were effective. If we want a better educated workforce, we don’t have to accept that it only means a degree. Some degrees are such poor value, they do need culling. Looking at student destinations, grades required and type of course would be a start. Plus reverting to HE colleges. Lower salaries for those in charge too!

Some students do a demanding degree and work very successfully. Some do a demanding degree and socialise / spend a lot. Impossible to generalise.

Lemon, the problem is that there were no fees when our children were born so parents did not save. Had we been given 18 years of notice that we would need to save up fees and rents that would have been fairer and more like the US where since the 1930s and earlier people have known it might be wise to set up a college fund.

I was going to say similar to Xenia - correcting Titchy on P1.
When our dc were born, nobody paid fees to go to University, so everyone didn't know when they were born.
Plus, of course we were paying over 10% on our mortgages at that time - didn't leave a lot spare to set up savings funds

I'm not talking about fees - parents don't contribute to fees. I'm talking about maintenance, which parents have ALWAYS been expected to contribute towards if they earned enough.

When our dc were born, nobody paid fees to go to University

To be fair, Labour introduced tuition fees in 1998 - admittedly at a much lower rate (£1000) than today - and the writing was on the wall. And parental contributions to maintenance from better off families have always been the norm.

I don‘t think fees will ever go away completely, even if they reduced or eliminated for some subjects, so I think we all need to get saving and encouraging our DC to do the same. It will be easier for some (living in cities with casual jobs) than for others.