Total student loan when child finish university?

[luckybees]

What was you or your child student loan total when you finished uni? How long was the course? What year you finished? Did you borrow fees and maintenance? Have you/your child paid it already?

DH and I were lucky not to pay for university fees; not from the UK and lived at home so didn’t get in debt.

7% for scheme 2. From the day loan is taken out. I'm sure how that's even legal ! Base rate was 0.75% when my DD started Uni.

@luckybees

Read this:

https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-england-plan-5/

My experience very similar to this. Graduated in 2006 after 3 year course. Parents able to fund course fees which were something like £1k a year.

Took £2k loan each year to cover living costs plus worked while I was there.

Left with £6k debt which I paid off pretty quickly once I was earning enough. I feel INCREDIBLY lucky, and worry about how I’ll cope if DS (6) wants to go in 12 years time……😬

Just to be clear, these are the published nhs consultant salaries. Then add in private fees! They start on nearly £110,000. We also know there’s plenty of GPs working part time and many who will be retiring. It’s just that doctors are always the most entitled grads. Other grads have always had competition for work and many aren’t successful. The loan enables doctors to earn the best salaries of any group of grads. Guaranteed highly paid work is a luxury few others enjoy.

I believe it was about £40k. Then another £10k for an MA took it to £50k. 8 years after graduating I have paid in about £8,000 but due to interest I now owe £67,000 🤦🏼‍♀️

Now doing a third degree but I just pay it off monthly.

You’re not a consultant straight out of graduation… it can take another decade to get there

Don’t forget they also change the terms retrospectively! And say that’s apparently legal

And do you really think your dc, or anyone else’s, would be eligible for a commercial unsecured loan. You can’t compare mortgage or BofE rates to SLC rates - 18 year olds wanting an unsecured loan would be charged way above SLC rates!

What terms have been changed retrospectively? Interest rate for plan 2 was always RPI / CPI plus 3%. Plan 5 is RPI only.

My DD paid off her student loans each time she got a bonus she paid it off student loan. It does affect how much mortgage you can have because whilst you are still repaying the loan you have less disposable income.

Primary legislation and statutory instruments would explain the legal bit.

https://studentloancalculator.uk/legal/parliamentary-loan-changes/

Not true. They froze the repayment threshold for plan 2, something that it was not stated could happen, and then changed the way it was done.

The initial understanding (though not legally binding) was that the repayment threshold would increase annually in line with average earnings. The change, announced in 2022, dictated that from April 2025 onwards, the threshold will rise in line with the lower RPI measure of inflation instead of average earnings.

Its been widely discussed and criticised.

@HarvestMouseandGoldenCups It wasn’t me who talked about consultant salaries and how they won’t pay off loans. Of course doctors have to wait to earn more but, with private work, it’s easy to pay off their loans when compared to others who earn 1/3 or half of this. It’s lower paid grads who haven’t got access to highly paid roles who will pay for far longer.

We only have the one DC. Paid about £30 a month into child trust fund from when she was a baby and GP paid £10pm and 18 years later we had just enough to cover fees and paid maintenance out of income and DD worked during summer tutoring. Zero student loan when she graduates in July.

I saw it as an all or nothing. If you take out fees loan but not maintenance then still have to (in the first few years at least ) pay the same as it is a percentage based on income and whether you took the student loan or the maintenance loan or both or had £10k debt or £90k debt you would pay the same if on the same income. Another recent difference is how long you’d pay and potentially for 40 years.

Shocking how we saddle our young with such enormous debt.
What has changed that our society can not afford to invest in education?
France, Sweden etc. do it better.

This research shows that after salary and student loads are taken into consideration, graduates earn 100-130k more than non graduates across their lifetime. However it varies a lot by subject - for medicine/law/economics it is much higher at 250-500k, whereas for creative arts and languages there is no benefit, and actually leads to a decrease in earnings for men.

https://ifs.org.uk/publications/impact-undergraduate-degrees-lifetime-earnings

Surely @Switchd you meant to use the past tense, showed, for a report published in 2020. We’ve likely seen further erosion since then.

Granted it’s not that old but we’ve had a few economic traumas in the first half of the decade. Then there’s the emerging impact of that AI thing.

It would be nice to see an updated report, but I doubt these type of report would be produced more than once a decade.

I actually do think about it quite a lot tbh

Me and my husband are 10k a year worse off than a couple in exactly the same position just 2 years older than us. Both of us do jobs that need a degree and are needed by the country

It's pretty fucking grating actually

Yes, though with advances in data analysis we might have hoped that a greater regularity could be achieved.

plus as your post observed some subjects offer, perhaps not too surprisingly, a significantly higher premium than others. I suspect that gap has perhaps widened further. I don’t know if @titchy has some latest insights on this.

Mine is about £27,000 I went to uni in 2012 and got full maintenance grant but the maintenance grant was not repayable. I did 4 years.

Tbh I've paid very little back because, at the moment (until it changes in 3 years) I pay a big whack into my pension from my gross salary which makes my student loan payments very small but the old government has buggered that for me in the long run!

I don't really stress about it. I think of it nore as a tax that has to be paid as it doesn"t affect things like mortgage applications etc.

My loan was just over 70k when I graduated, I've paid off 20k and it now stands at 80k 🙃🙃

I gained about 10k of interest just whilst doing my degree, and because the interest rate is so high only a few years of low earnings mean it can sky rocket (which most careers even high earners have). Bear in mind the interest rate increases with earnings, so you have to earn a lot to be paying back more than the interest. By the time you've got to that point again the debt has increased so much that you have to earn more and more to be in the green

You’re complaining they changed the ts and cs to benefit the student. Ok I can live with that!

We/Ds(21) have been fortunate, he is in year 4 of his Mechanical Engineering degree and zero student debt.

We are in Scotland so no fees. His first choice uni was only 40 minutes away and he decided to, like many Scottish students, commute so no accommodation was needed. He works PT and earns around £8-10k a year so no maintenance loan needed.

It also means some of his JISA/ISA that was meant for uni has been able to be converted into a LISA over the last 4 years hopefully towards a future house deposit.

I’m slightly above average earner, far from rich, but I am very debt adverse unless it is strongly in my favour, the only debt I have is an Energy Trust 0% loan for our car. I would really struggle with the English system of massive student debt.

Yes consultants are well paid, but medicine is a career where there's a good 10 years where you will be earning less than the threshold needed to start paying back. The first few years of the career see the loan increase a lot because the salary is quite low compared to the amount borrowed. Bear in mind medicine is a 5-6 year degree where the loan is accruing interest and no repayments compared compared most 3-4 year degrees. And a larger loan because 5-6 years of maintenance

Let's be honest the government knows how exactly how much doctors earn, they know how to maximise the amount they make from student loans. They can easily control the figures to ensure they reap maximum benefit