Parents of students - how much do you contribute?

[diydemon]

Thinking ahead (not that far) to dd1 going to uni - we're trying to work out how much it'll cost.

Our income means she'll only get the tuition fees and 75% of the maintenance loan and we/she (through PT work) will need to fund the rest.

How much is "the rest" though? The directgov calculator suggests a parental contribution/student earned income of £7444 per annum, bringing it to a total of around £10k (without tuition fees)

Is this realistic? Can/do they manage on that or do you find you have to fork out more?

Yes - fee loan for everyone, maintenance loan depending on income, but if you are eligible for a grant as well you lose some of your loan. The grant is £2906 if your household income is under £25k - you get a partial grant if your income is between £25K and £50K.

Some more stuff here If you look at the loan table at the bottom you'll see that if you earn less than £25k you get more money and less to pay back because there is almost as much grant as loan.

Dunno about the £10k Riven - depends on how well you expect to live I suppose. ds2 has to manage with the basics.

If you're on less that £25k dd will get more loan than that (£3497 according to that table).

There are 3 different loans/grants

Tuition fees - currently £3225, everyone can get 100% loan for these

Maintenance loan: various amounts according to where you live & study, maximum for living away from home outside London currently £4,950 - everyone gets about 3/4 of this (used to be 75%, now 72%) Above a certain income (it was about £38,000 when DS started) it is means tested.

Maintenance grant: you can get the full grant (just under £3000) if parents income is

Thanks for all the info here. Dh and I both work ft and earn quite a bit over £50k.

So, as far as I can tell, dd1 will be eligible for the tuition fees loan and a maximum of 72% of the maintenance loan - is that right? Or will it be less than 72% based on our income? Then she pays back whatever loan has accrued once she's earning over £15k.

By which time dd2 will be at uni and it'll have all started again.

I'm warning both of them now that it's really not worth going to uni unless they're studying for a degree which has a likelihood of decent employment at the end of it.

Through my work I'm seeing too many students on ill-thought-out degree courses with mounting debt and scant chance of the employment they'd like at the end of it...many of them would've been better off leaving with A'levels if they could have found work then.