How much does it cost, in your experience?

[DistrictCommissioner]

As long as a piece of string I suspect, but roughly how much does it cost to have a child at university, not eligible for any additional funding. I can imagine it varies a great deal by location?

I’ve one starting this year on minimum non London loan. I plan to pay between £8k per year to top him up. I’ll pay his accomodation which is £6200 and top up his loan by a couple of hundred pounds a month. He will be very comfortable but that’s the decision I’ve made for him. I could do it on less and just top him up to the Max loan or not top him up and he could work to make up the difference

We have chosen to pay the rent for ours & they live off the loan and any earnings from holiday jobs etc. Other families put the loan towards the rent (usually need to top it up) & then give a set amount per month for bills & spending money.

So I would say look at how much monthly rent would be (in halls initially & then private rental) & this would give you a ballpark figure. It does vary a huge amount - Dd at northern uni cost around £350 per month, Ds in the West Country is £550!

I also pay for the odd other thing like contact lenses, train fares home etc.

We pay DS's accommodation which is very reasonable at
£1600 per term. He then gets around £3000 a year allowance (split into slightly more generous monthly allowance in term time and less in holiday time). So £7,800 pa at the moment. He has not taken a maintenance loan and he manages fine. He has a summer job and does some tutoring in term time for anything extra. He is lucky to get 3 out of 4 years college accommodation, it will be a different story when the private rental kicks in!

We topped dc1 up to the full maintenance loan amount (Northern uni) .. we paid for phone and the odd Train ticket and a bit of food on dropping off . They did fine on that ( hall accommodation was 5.5k for the first year ) and they had money left over. We will do the same for Dc2 who I suspect will not manage fine on it as accommodation costs will be more at intended uni and dc2 likes to spend . Sharp learning curve will hopefully happen .. sooner the better.

We haven’t done finance so £9250 fees plus about £5800 rent (first year halls, will be less next year) plus £400 spending for 10 months a year plus a few extra things - I pay for dentist, car insurance, private healthcare and every so often I buy him some clothes. Ignoring the extras about £15.5k per annum which is cheaper than his school fees so I don’t mind keeping that going for 3 extra years.

Sorry I mean 19k. Still cheaper than his school fees were.

I am the same as Delphi.

For most parents with children with loans look at the maximum loan for that place - London or outside of London and then make the minimum up to the maximum and you cannot go too far wrong. Eg max loan outside London might be £8400 and minimum £4300 ( I am rough guessing at those figures). My parents did the same in the 1980s - made my very very small minimum maintenance grant up to the full grant which the less well off got in those days.

My daughter’s private halls are over £200 a week. London.

Interesting, thanks. Our eldest is 12 so just sort of dawning on us that this is on the horizon...

It’s worth planning ahead for sure. I increased my hours when my youngest started school partly so we would be able to support them through uni.

I think it does vary a lot by location. My D1's accommodation charges are £1.5k per term plus a minimum of £175 credit on her PAYG card for hall food. She topped this up once and also spent a bit on Deliveroo. (This is in first term, last October) She gets the maintenance loan plus a (non repayable) bursary from the university, plus £500 travel expenses p.a. She can charge some book costs to the dept. She has a savings account for emergencies. We pay some money into her savings (as have always done) pay for her phone, contact lenses, Netflix and Spotify (family subs). Next year she'll be living out and the rents are really high. I think she should be able to manage this with the money she's saved from having a term at home this year. Her houseshare is walking distance from college so she won't have busfares to pay.

£1000 a month which covers rent as well as living expenses
Doesn’t take a loan and doesn’t work in term time
Also pay for phone and contact lenses and a big shop at beginning of term
My parents give him 500 a term
I was a very poor student and didn’t want the same for mine

8.5K for a catered hall, around £2000 additional spending money for the year for other necessities. Roughly £1000 in flights backwards and forwards from home to Uni. Roughly £11.5-12k

OP. Lots of the replies here do not reflect the vast majority of students who DO take the loans they are entitled to take. There are, of course, rich ones who don’t but they are far from the norm.

You need to consider how much money you have and also look at MSE (Martin Lewis - Money Saving Expert). This will inform you that the loan is a graduate tax and many students never get close to paying it off. So armed with realistic info, would you rather spend the money in a house deposit for DC? How much can you realistically afford every month? How much can you save in the next 6 years?

Yes. The cost of student living varies. Newcastle has always been viewed as cheaper than Bristol. London is expensive. However, aim high and let dc go to where is best! Don’t choose on cost of living. Choose on course and prestige of university.

Gosh, it's more than I expected!!

@Budapestdreams
What did you expect? Parents are expected to make up at least the shortfall between the minimum loan (if that’s what the student gets) and the full loan amount. However lots of students can struggle on that sum and they will try and work in the vacations and during their time at university.

It also depends what a student wants. There are plenty of MN parents who cheerfully state their DC survive on next to nothing. £100 a month. My DDs did not and wanted a more interesting student life! You also need to work our who is paying for the phone, travel home, clothes, sports clubs and other expensive items. You need to sit down with dc and work up a budget from £0 taking hall expenses into account which could be £4000 pa or £10,000 pa in London!

It's expensive! I have two currently in uni, both get the minimum maintenance loan - one in London, one outside. We pay for their accommodation which for the both of them is in excess of £15k per year. We also pay for their phones, television licence and some travel expenses. They live off their maintenance loan - when in halls this is plenty as they have no other bills to cover. Our London dc is (hopefully) going into a house share next year, so I imagine we'll help with some of those bills too.

Buda, it does not have to cost parents a penny as there is no obligation to pay anything. Also if the child gets the full loan because your income is low they will be fine on that. If they get the minimum loan then plenty work all summer and have jobs in term time to make up the difference between minimum and maximum loan. They also pick cheaper accommodation and that kind of thing. They can then go even with minimum loan without a penny from parents.

Hi OP we started saving for our older children quite late (having seen a Martin Lewis programme) but we also have a 12 yr old and we starting saving £100 a month for her about a year ago.

She had about £3k already from nominal savings as a baby / some money for birthdays etc. We're working on having to pay at least £5k per year for 3 years, so worked on £15k over 3 years. 10 years of saving (I.e. between 11 and 21 - when she graduates) so 10 years x 12 months x £100 is £12k, plus the £3k she already had.

I know it might be more than £15k by the time she gets there but hopefully interest on savings will counter act the increase to some extent and if we do have to top up, it won't be by big amounts.

I think if you save early, it's not too hard to swallow. If only we'd done that with our older children

Some courses such as medicine and vet degrees really mean the student will have limited earning capability whilst at uni. A course with 6 hours contact time will be different. Basing rent on a minimum loan and student earnings is very very risky. In my view parents are expected to contribute. That’s why their income is taken into account.

Remember, University isn't compulsory.
Nor is it the only option post 18.

Mine have £9000 made up of loan, bursary and money from each parent. They have leftover money this year proving that you can live on the student loan if shops, pubs and restaurants are shut!

Your child will be an adult, and is making an adult decision about whether to go into debt and/or take/borrow money off their parents.

Presumably they're doing this because they feel it worth spending £30k++ on their chosen career plan.

If, as a an adult, they make this decision,then fine. But I believe that they should take on the financial burden to a degree. Be that by taking loans and/or working through uni etc.

It's very bizarre to me that on MN it's almost treated as though uni is the only option and that the only option is to find their adult offsprings choice.

I think it costs around £20 - £24000 per year in total.

Fees £9250 - and accommodation, food, transport, socialising etc around £1000 per month depending on where they are and where you live.

Students who need to pay for 12 months housing in London will be paying far more than those paying for 9 months in the North. Oxbridge collleges often work out very cheap - £4500 to £5000 for the academic year.

Most students will take the loan for the fees and the maintenance loan. Most will also work in the summer vacation. Some internships can be well paid - especially where no tax is payable.

Some universities have restrictions on term-time working, Cambridge for example. Mind you the accommodation costs are quite low (a result of owning half the town, I expect).

S1 gets the full maintenance loan, thanks to a well-timed redundancy, and so automatically got a small bursary as well, presumably intended to help those students who don't have generous savings accounts built up over the years or a good level of tech and other equipment.

He also had a choral scholarship (which isn't much in itself but includes the use of his accommodation with no extra charge during the parts of the vacs he's required to be there, and involves payments for recordings and various extras).

He has probably a mid-level room (this year has been slightly different as they put the older choral scholars in a house all together). He doesn't like alcohol and does a lot of music and similar hobbies which aren't costing him much. When he cooks for himself he uses a lot of lentils. He pays his own phone contract and uses our household's Prime and Disney+ services and the university internet.

He's saved masses. Not entirely certain how much but I'm fairly sure he hasn't spent more than the loan amount. We should probably have charged him food money while he was here...