Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 42 total)
  • Cost of University
  • thecrookofdevon
    Full Member

    Okay so the wife and I have finally got round to the “how are we going to fund 4 kids going to university in the next 15 years”. So how much does it cost for a kid to go through Uni assume it is a Scottish Uni (so no tuition fees), 4 year courses (although one could end up doing medicine). Are we talking £20k per child or is it closer to £40k? This is assuming a fairly basic standard of living/working during the holidays type thing.
    Oh and I know we should have started saving a long time ago but the time machine is broken at the mo.

    ahwiles
    Free Member

    student loans covered most of my fees + rent. All i needed from my parents was enough for food.

    if i wanted money to burn, i had to earn it with summer jobs.

    i don’t see why any of that will have changed.

    And when your kids finally get a job, they pay back the student loans compay at a very affordable rate.

    (the fresh graduates at my place pay back about £17/month, which is hardly a burden)

    IA
    Full Member

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    Northwind
    Full Member

    TBH nobody really knows (best estimates of current costs from 15 years ago vary wildly, none predicted the changes in tuition fee structures etc or the changes in student loans) No guarantee that it’ll still be free for scots frinstance. No guarantee there’ll still be a UK!

    (that’s not quite word for word the official advice we give out, but it’s not far off)

    None of us took a penny from my parents other than board (we all stayed at home to varying extents, and when we didn’t, we paid). Just wasn’t an option for them to do more. We did alright… And though I’d say that while not having to stress about money when you’re a student would be helpful in some ways, having to budget and to work as a student is helpful in others.

    boxelder
    Full Member

    Parents shouldn’t pay anything on fees now – paid as a ‘tax’ by the graduate.

    alialiali
    Free Member

    It didn’t cost my parents much more than a few trips along the M4.
    However, I will never fully pay off my loan at the rate it current accrues interest. Considering I’m a civil servant, doing a job the government would regard as ‘quite good’ this seems a little out of kilter.

    stev0
    Free Member

    Coming to an end of what seemed like a very long 4 years at university, at an estimate my current debt is around £25,000 rising to around £35,000 if i decide to do a masters. However this is tuition fee loans as well as maintenance loans, so without having to pay tuition fees I imagine total debt would be around £10,000. However i would strongly encourage your child/children to get a 10-12 hour a week part time job, gives them experience in time management and looks good on a C.V, you would not believe how many of my peers have never worked a day in there life and their C.V looks very bare.

    Garry_Lager
    Full Member

    Tuition fees are likely in Scotland IMO – don’t bank on it being free in 15 yrs time as Northwind mentions.

    Direct entry into second year is possible in Scotland making it a 3 year BSc / 4 year Masters. Obv not every kid’s cup of tea though.

    There’s a balance to be struck between having your children pay their way with p/t jobs etc, and sheltering them as much as you can from financial stress when they’re immersed in their degrees.

    bwaarp
    Free Member

    Depends where they go. If they go to Oxford University or Brookes they will end up paying London rates, without the London loan.

    My student maintenance loan covers my rent from September to June and that is all. If you don’t want to put any money towards their university that’s fine but don’t expect them to get a first if they are working 25 hours a week to stay afloat. I basically just went massively overdrawn every academic year and then paid it off over the summer instead of working part time as my brain can’t handle doing a Biomedical degree and a job.

    Encourage them to take a gap year, to save 5-7k and then prepare to spend 2k a year yourselves per the duration of the course. Unless they go up North where living costs are lower. I’d also ask yourselves if you really want each of your children to be saddled with 40,000 pounds worth of debt for a substandard education, if not and you both earn a decent amount try and encourage them to get a scholarship and pay for them to go to the States. Or have them become doctors (paid for by the NHS unless this changes).

    robbo
    Free Member

    You could choose to send just one. Pick your favourite and send her.

    Really just start saving now. Better late than never. At least use the child benefit. We thought of it as school fees and put that away each month. My two daughters will be debt free thank god!

    robsoctane
    Free Member

    What has this got to do with bikes, OP? If you can’t get a forum category correct what chance do your kids have? 😯

    USE THE CHAT FORUM 🙄

    user-removed
    Free Member

    I came to uni late – 26 year old mature student and didn’t ask for, or expect any help from my parents. Although I went to an English uni, I’m Scottish, so my fees were covered which freed up my student loan for rent.

    I got a P/T job (20 – 25 hours a week) no problem and managed to keep up a semi-decent social life.

    Had to apply for a hardship grant in second year but that was only £120 so not much in the grand scheme of things…

    I guess being a bit older and wiser helped – I didn’t run out of the bank with my first loan installment and drop wads of cash on clothes / CDs / electric guitars / getting hammered*

    *Actually, maybe I did, but just the once 😳

    bigrich
    Full Member

    What has this got to do with bikes, OP? If you can’t get a forum category correct what chance do your kids have?

    USE THE CHAT FORUM

    everything to do with bikes, if you ask me. How is he going to afford even the most rudimentary of dropper post/suspension design if he’s got to squirrel away that much cash? The horror!

    ahwiles
    Free Member

    ask yourselves if you really want each of your children to be saddled with 40,000 pounds worth of debt

    but it’s not real debt.

    it’s more like a ‘slate’, that’s wiped after 30 years.

    debt is a problem because you can get into difficulties if your circumstances change and you can’t meet the repayments.

    student loans don’t work like that.

    debt is a problem because it can affect your ability to borrow more, for a mortgage or whatever.

    student loans don’t do that.

    debt can be a problem, student loans really aren’t.

    (and the repayments are tiny)

    mooman
    Free Member

    bwaarp – the NHS does not pay for you to become a doctor as far as I know??

    If they do … then i guess my son is fleecing me & his mother!

    Del
    Full Member

    unless you already live in scotland, or the system has changed recently ( and apologies if so ), you won’t get tuition free until they’ve been in scotland for 3 years.

    jota180
    Free Member

    As parents – it’ll cost you nothing other than they won’t ‘grow up’ as early as some kids so you’ll be feeding them into their 20s

    I gave my girls spending money each month but they could have got a part-time job if I couldn’t have afforded it or didn’t want to pay

    jota180
    Free Member

    debt is a problem because it can affect your ability to borrow more, for a mortgage or whatever.

    Do they not take loan repayments into consideration when calculating whether or not you can afford the mortgage?

    jambalaya
    Free Member

    The recently introduced University fees, absolute robbery. @crookofdevon you are doing the right thing, what most American parents do which is to start saving when their children are small. I cannot see Scotland maintaining these discounts in the future (note Scottish Uni’s are free from tuition fees for Scots and for all EU citizens eg French, Germans etc – its only the English who pay). I firmly believe for a significant portion of kids Uni doesn’t make financial sense.

    For my 18yr old we are budgeting £50k for a English Uni degree (likely Leeds or Sussex), our older kids who pay the lower £3k pa we budget £30k. Our kids take out the full loan and we top up about £5k pa, mainly for accommodation costs. Other kids make do with just the loans. Our kids work during holidays, we pay top up so they don’t have to work during term time as we feel it distracts from study time.

    All of this is in today’s money, in 15 yrs who knows.

    trail_rat
    Free Member

    “Do they not take loan repayments into consideration when calculating whether or not you can afford the mortgage? “

    all the mortgages i looked into specifically said they do not take the value of the loan into account purely the monthly payment as it is a fixed % of your wage for your working life till its paid off.

    jota180
    Free Member

    purely the monthly payment as it is a fixed % of your wage for your working life till its paid off

    That’s what I meant, it does have a small affect on the amount you can borrow

    No bad thing probably

    jb79
    Free Member

    bwaarp – the NHS does not pay for you to become a doctor as far as I know??
    If they do … then i guess my son is fleecing me & his mother!

    No it doesn’t. The NHS pays bursaries for some courses (e.g. nursing) but never has done and still does not for medicine AFAIK.

    jonba
    Free Member

    The amount that it is being messed around with I suspect fees will be different in the next 15 years. With all the social engineering that is going on I can see some of the top universities becoming fully private in the next 10 years and Scotland starting to charge fees.

    If you can’t find the whole sum for 4 kids then you would still be helpful having a lump sum to help them reduce the amount of debt they take on.

    What might be worth considering is how you spend this money. Student loans are relatively cheap compared to other loans. You may be more helpful giving/helping them with a deposit on their first house or buying a car when they start their first job.

    It’s going to be very difficult to predict living expenses in 15 years time, save as much as you can.

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    I did a masters (4years) lived in a cheep room in Sheffield (i.e. there wasn’t an en-suite, but otherwise it was a nice enough house), took a couple of hundred off my parents if they offered it once a term which covered trains too/from home once a month.

    Ended uni with £5k in savings as I’d not touched the summer job money from the last 2 years.

    Nothings changed in terms of money upfront or how the loans work since then, the loans have just gottne bigger. It’s still £1600 a term to cover living costs and another loan to cover fees (which I didn’t take as my parents earnt below the threshold to pay them).

    If anything the new loans are cheeper as they’re set at a level which means on average students wont pay it off before it’s written off. So low earners aren’t penalised with longer terms, and high earners pay back more. And it’s not a noticable ammount per month.

    I wouldn’t go to Ammerica as someone up there suggested, a guy I work with (earning arround 36k) pay’s his rent in a crap part of town, the interest on on the loan and then has no money for the rest of the month.

    iainc
    Full Member

    IA linked my post from a few months ago. Daughter starting Law at Edinburgh Uni later this year. Tuition fees paid for us by Big Eck 😆 so she will go for maximum student loan, which will pay her Halls costs and not much more. Between me and her mum (we divorced 15 yrs ago and both have new families etc) we will be paying daughter £300 a month, which she will augment by waitressing/holiday work etc. We all seem to think this is fair and about the right amount

    trailmonkey
    Full Member

    People can get a very decent university education by studying part time and earning as they do so.

    If people think that they have to spend 50k per child to get them degree eduacated, it says more about their own snobbery in sending them to ‘good’ universities rather than having any basis in fact.

    I’m 6 months away from graduating at a cost of £3500 (£7000 if started now) and I’ve earned a full time (low)wage during all of it.

    Yes the system is shit, yes oxbridge graduates will always have an advantage but none of it means that education has been denied to lower income families because I’m living proof that it hasn’t/isn’t being.

    MadPierre
    Full Member

    You are assuming all the kids are smart enough and wanting to go to Uni?

    Maybe some will turn out to be thickies or not fancy it and save you a few quid?

    …. Ooops I forgot. Kids can’t be thick these days can they?

    Del
    Full Member

    😕
    of course kids are ‘allowed to be thick’. difficult to prevent them from being so, on occasion! the OP has 4 kids that could all potentially be worthy of higher education, so has to try and make provision for that eventuality. or maybe you’d prefer he just hedged his bets and assumed that out of 4 of them only 2 might be smart and/or hardworking enough?

    it’s very possible that you can get a decent education on the cheap, but it’s also about the people you mix with at college, for a youngster in particular this can be a powerful motivating force, and also can help them make connections among their peers that prove useful in later life.
    then there’s the thing about taking them out of their comfort zone and mixing with people from all walks of life and from different backgrounds, but moving forwards i guess the higher education system will become more and more middle/upper class, as less and less poorer folk can afford to have kids go, or are less willing to take the chance on it.

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    People can get a very decent university level education by studying part time and earning as they do so but miss out on sex, drugs, Rock and roll and going biking in daylight 7 days a week.

    FTFY

    Uni is a lot more than lectures. I’d considder doing it part time if I’d got a job straight from school and was now 30, but everyone I know who stayed at home/did it part time, the only thing they have to say in it’s favour is that they have no debt.

    Yes the system is shit, yes oxbridge graduates will always have an advantage

    Thats a pretty big chip on your shoulder, Oxbridge grads might be better, but that’s only because they only take the best to start with, people with 3 or more A’s etc. And they actualy reject people, every other course I applied for sent me the offer before the interview! Having gone through the process and got an offer (went to Sheffield in the end) I’d say they really do give state schools a helping hand over the public schools, even the interviews were on different days*.

    *Which made for an interesting mix on the 2nd day as we’d all been in the pub the night before the maths exam whereas the private school kids looked at us like we were mad when we told them we were off out again.

    AndyP
    Free Member

    but it’s not real debt.

    it’s more like a ‘slate’, that’s wiped after 30 years.

    debt is a problem because you can get into difficulties if your circumstances change and you can’t meet the repayments.

    student loans don’t work like that.

    debt is a problem because it can affect your ability to borrow more, for a mortgage or whatever.

    student loans don’t do that.
    debt can be a problem, student loans really aren’t.

    (and the repayments are tiny)

    This. Plus, of course, the standard of teaching will be better because the universities will now be able to afford it. win/win.

    cookeaa
    Full Member

    The whole topic scares and depresses me…
    My own conservative estimate at the minute for when my currently two and a half year old eldest daughter gets to uni age is an all in cost for a 3 year course of ~£60-70k I reckon, and she appears to be a clever bugger Damn it…
    I certainly wouldn’t want her to miss out on an opportunity which I and many of my generation enjoyed (arguably not all of us deserved it either), but I also am not keen on her having such huge sums of debt against her name from the age of ~21 until she retires (or whatever the arangement will be by then), yes student loans are lower rate than just about any other form of loan, but there is still the expectation that my children will have to acrue significant personal debt to earn a degree where their grandparents (both useful contributing members of society) were given grants, and left university with degrees, improved prospects of employment, and no debts…
    Within two generations we taken University education from a realistically accessable prospect for all in society with the capacity to learn, to a financial millstone for those cursed with the capacity to learn…

    I think my fundamental issue is that all of the current arguments over the “value” of a degree seem to focus on the imediate financial cost, especially if it’s been bourne up front by the poor old (cash strapped) state, perhaps a University degree has lost it’s percieved value thanks to courses like “David Beckham Studies” or just the sheer volume of applicants going up and up over the last couple of decades, but the theory at least is that a degree (generaly speaking) should qualify an individual to perform a greater, more valuable, function as part of our work force (something which you would hope to be recognised in higher average pay for graduates, and hence greater tax revenues going to the state?), I think that has been lost along with various other possible measures of “Value for Money” in areas where the state invests money.

    I personally don’t see how Dave and Nick propose to turn us into a growing, competing, modern European “Knowledge based” economy we apparently need to become when access to the means by which you facilitate that growth are dictated not by peoples ability to learn but by either their ability to pay or acceptance of life long personaly debt…

    We expect NHS nurses to hold a degree now, it is obviously felt that this level of qualification adds to their ability to do the job and delivers better value for the health service, it’s obviously a vocational degree, but I doubt the vocation for which it prepares a nurse actually pays sufficiently for them to clear that debt within their working life… So where is the “value” in that? his or her salary will be garnished for the duration of their career for having gained suitable qualifications to do the job in the first place genius eh?

    edsbike
    Free Member

    I graduated from a four year last year and I’m just about to start paying back my student loan (around £28000) at about £90 a month, so not an insignificant amount. It is a percentage of anything earned over £15000.

    My maintenance loan covered my rent (Manchester) but nothing else. I was lucky enough to get some money from my parents (about £2500 a year) in weekly payments, which covered all my essential living expenses and a little bit for clothes etc.

    I worked all my holidays (so around 4-5 months of the year!) in a bike shop back home and as a guide in the Alps in the summers and that gave me spending money to be able to afford bikes, kit, fun etc.

    I never struggled for money, and didn’t have to work during term time, and my degree probably cost my parents around £10000. I started paying them back as soon as I found a full time job last September.

    I was lucky to have parents who could afford to support me, but if they hadn’t been in that position, I could easily have had a term-time job to help out. No one is that busy with university work that they couldn’t work part time. If anyone says that they must be very poor at time management or spend too long in bed. I treated uni as (nearly) full time, being in lectures, labs, workshops from 9 til 4 most days, and still had bags of free time.

    I wouldn’t worry about needing £40000 per child, they could manage on nothing from you but a helping hand goes a long way when they can get a maintenance loan.

    Ed

    ahwiles
    Free Member

    The whole topic scares and depresses me…

    it shouldn’t – at all.

    you don’t need any money up front. you can borrow more or less all you need, the repayments are small, and you only pay if you’re earning over £21k.

    it’s really not a bad system.

    (it can’t be completely free – someone has to pay the cost of sending 50ish% of kids through uni, it could be done through raising income tax for everyone, but i don’t think that would be fair)

    jota180 – Member

    Do they not take loan repayments into consideration when calculating whether or not you can afford the mortgage?

    yes, the monthly repayments are taken into account, but not the amount you ‘owe’ and the repayments will be very small, basically about the same as a mobile-phone bill.

    (assuming we’re talking about people lucky enough to be making repayments under the new system)

    Baldysquirt
    Full Member

    Ed, any chance you can put your loan repayments into the context of how much you currently earn?

    I finished 5 years at uni in 2004 and started paying some of my loan back when I was earning £15,000 a year and some £24,000 a year (two different loan types over that period). At one point when I was earning £24,000 I was paying back around £300 a month. It wasn’t that bad, I still managed to save additional money. I paid off my loans (which was a large sum to find) when the interest jumped in line with high inflation a couple of years back.

    I think the new loans system just needs to be viewed by most as a graduate tax. Very few students will ever pay the whole figure off in 30 years so the headline figure is meaningless. You would never need to find a lump sum to pay off the loan when interest leaps up as the total cost will never be paid off anyway, so it matters little how fast or slow it’s accruing interest. The repayments are a small fraction (relatively) of what you earn and, as such, are very manageable. If people ignore the headline figure, the current system is, IMHO, better for most.

    ahwiles
    Free Member

    At one point when I was earning £24,000 I was paying back around £300 a month

    eh?

    £24k – £15k = £9k

    £9000 x 10% = £900

    £900/year = £75/month…

    and THAT’s under the old system, the one that noone complained about.

    here’s the same calc’s for the new system – the one that destroyed Nick Clegg’s career:

    £24k – £21k = £3k

    £3000 x 10% = £300

    £300/year = £25/month, about the same as an iphone bill…

    Nasty, Nasty, Nick Clegg, helping the evil tories cut the effective cost of uni by 67%*.

    (*for the example shown above. lower earners will save even more)

    thisisnotaspoon
    Free Member

    what ahwiles said, yes a grad* might come out with a £40k debt on paper, but it’s not a debt like a mortgage or bank loan. It’s paid back based on your income, it just appears on your payslip allong with income tax, nat insurance, pension contributions etc. It’d be nicer if it wasn’t there, but it’s not exactly crippling, and it only gets bigger when you start earning money, so pay rises are just fractions of a percent less in real terms.

    The new system whilst it looks bad with talk of £60k debts for a masters is infact better thn the old (ca. £30k debt) system as the repayments are lower for low earners and higher for high earners due to the higher threshold before any payments have to be made then a higher rate above that. A below average earner will actualy pay less in total under the new system than the old one!

    *I originaly wrote nurse, but someone up there said their fees are paid?

    cookeaa
    Full Member

    ahwiles – I understand the system, I just fundamentally don’t agree with it I’ve got first hand experience of the SLC, Arse/Elbow differentiation is a task I would put well beyond their collective capacity, and I still don’t see where the actual “Value” is for the public purse? in all of this, the whole scheme looses money and is bankrolled “up-front” by the state…

    Having had the temerity to go and get a degree and thus become (in theory at least) a higher earner than you would otherwise have been you’re salary is skimmed for a loan repayments, surely qualification and then becoming a tax paying member of the work force is a reasonably mechanism by which to give back…

    Yes the loan is on very reasonable terms, but my parents generation (the generation that basically started to impose this new funding arrangement) effectively had to pay nothing, they were given grants… My own tuiton fees were means assessed and I think hat was reasonable on the whole, those who really couldn’t afford it didn’t have to pay, I can’t see the current setup where a blanket ~£27000 worth of tuition fees is the stating point for student debt is really an equitable arrangement when compared with the situation their grandparents faced…

    The loan you’ll never repay adds to the various funding gaps in public spending, and is simply shored up with pension funds but thats a whole different debate…

    ahwiles
    Free Member

    but only 5% of your / our parents generation had access to university.

    now it’s closer to 50%, the cost has gone up.

    do you think everyone should pay – even those who haven’t been to uni?

    the new system isn’t perfect, but it’s 67%* better than the old system that noone complained about…

    (*see calc’s above)

    edsbike
    Free Member

    Baldysquirt,

    I repay on the system that has been in place for the past 5-6 years, I’d guess that you’re on the ‘old’ system where your tuition fees were lower (around £1500?), but the repayment scheme different. It sounds like you’re paying back more monthly but have less to pay off, so you’ll actually pay the whole thing off. Awhiles is comparing the new system (coming in in Sept this year) and the current/old system that I’m on.

    Saying 10% (if that’s the actual amount?) of whatever over £15k you earn per year gives you an idea of what I earn on my grad job, it’s above average but not by loads.

    I just don’t see the point of the new system, it’s made millions of people pissed of yet (according to awhiles calcs) won’t claw back as much money. Surely a lose/lose?

    ahwiles
    Free Member

    the point is that it’s actually cheaper for most people.

    a fact lost on most people…

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