It's normal to have a student loan isn't it?

[elliejjtiny]

Dc1 and dc2 have student loans as we did at university and most of my friends did. I think there was one girl whose parents paid for everything and then bought her a flat at the end of university but she was the only one. We visit them, take them out for dinner and do a food shop. I've found out a relative has saved enough money for their children to go to university without having to pay anything and then enough for a house deposit. The dc aren't even teenagers yet. That's not normal is it?

No, it’s not normal. Very few families can do this.

It's not common but it's not unheard of.

Not normal.

If your dc go to a uni with a very high percentage of international students and commuters ( London unis, mostly) then it’s possible that more students don’t have loans than do ( international students are typically wealthy by definition) but otherwise having some loans would be normal.

I only know one student whose grandparents are providing everything.

A few others are taking the loan for fees but not for maintenance, but that's because their child has saved enough from part time work to pay their own maintenance. Be interesting to see if they do that for all three years.

Oh good.

We saved enough money for our dc to go to uni without taking out a student loan, but it’s unusual - dd says she was the only student she knew who didn’t have a loan.

Yes, it's normal.

Dc1 has a job in the holidays but that pays for fun stuff.

Even when I was at uni there was a huge huge spectrum of wealth from people with full grants ( this was pre tuition fees- I am old) to people with seemingly unlimited spends or trust funds. I just had to cut my cloth and accept that I’d be working all holidays while some of my friends swanned around Asia. It’s just life.

Yes, it’s normal to have a loan. Stats show that almost all students do.

I had a friend at uni whose parents paid for everything - tuition plus all living expenses. But for them, it was cheaper than the private boarding school fees they’d been paying before he went to uni.

Our four will all have loans but they have friends whose parents have paid for them... as others have said, if you have been paying boarding fees, then it's not really an issue ..!

Most have loans ime. Ds doesn’t as we were living overseas at the time and therefore not eligible for any loans- which is fair- and we paid for everything.
I went to university in the 80s and some students were supported by wealthy parents eg buying a house for accommodation in years two and three.

We are trying to sort it so DD doesn’t use them. I have no objection to the idea of them but I think the interest rates are ridiculous, they should be a very low interest loan. You should be able to pay them back easily if working.
we’re saving to pay for her and if we don’t have enough we’ll take a small private loan and pay that off in a few years anyway.

When my DH went to uni PIL paid the interest on the loan each month. I’d like to be able to do that but given the state of things I doubt we will

None of our children had student loans but we had put money aside for them when they were very small to cover the costs of their education and a house deposit. This was a tax efficient move (by passing the money to the children we paid 10% tax on money that we would otherwise have paid 50% tax on) in another country so unusual circumstances.

I think more families will be trying to save up to do this, given what we now understand about the cost of student loans!

But no, obviously most people can’t afford it.

thinking about it, pretty much any private school would cost more than paying tuition fees plus maintenance- not many private schools below 20k a year, so maybe there’s more loan free students than I’d initially thought, particularly if you consider that there are people who could afford private school but don’t use them for various reasons ( availability of grammars, ideology etc) although they’re probably offset by parents who struggled to pay fees and don’t continue the support during uni ( ie private school students who then take loans for uni). Then there are commuters where the parents may be able to afford to pay tuition fees and they don’t need a maintenance loan.

They’ll still be the minority of course but they won’t be evenly spread amongst all the unis so there are likely maybe 10-20 unis where the proportion of loan free undergrad students could be like ( loose estimate) 25%?

We have been putting £100/month into DD child trust fund/ISA since she was a baby. This should cover her fees. I’m hopeful we will pay off the mortgage by the time she goes to uni and will use that monthly payment to help with maintenance instead. I had a free uni education yonks ago and I’d like her to have that start in life too. Appreciate this is not an option for many but we are far from wealthy and with careful planning (no fancy cars or holidays) should be able to avoid loans. We only have the one child which makes a big difference.

None of the kids we know who went to independent secondary schools took out loans. The fees and loans were cheaper than their school fees. Dc takes out the tuition fee loan but not the maintenance loan.

She might choose not to use it for that though.

DH’s parents paid for his which was the first time I’d come across it. I will have my student loan until it expires, I can’t remember the last time I earned enough to pay any.

I dont know anyone who had a loan. Most had part time jobs to pay for it themselves and those that were lucky enough got help from parents or grandparents.

It WAS once quite normal (even for those from very modest backgrounds, as long as they were willing to get one of the many easily available jobs), just as it was once normal to spend a couple of minutes on the phone and have a GP appointment/homevisit from a GP you knew, but the only thing that is the same from that period to now is teenagers loving Oasis.

Normal perhaps not, but I suspect more people are limiting their family size these days with a view of being able to do more to support their young adults. I have to admit it didn’t occur to me much at all when I was younger as I was plan 1 which was quite reasonable and I paid off relatively quickly, but with student loans as they are now, so deeply unfair and ridiculous, I would like to limit the impact to my own children.