MY CHILDREN AND THEIR STUDENT DEBT
How utterly depressing that two out of three of my children have already been saddled with over £50,000 worth of debt before they’ve even started their careers.
It is hardly surprising that the proportion of students who say that university is poor value for money has doubled in the last five years. A third of students now express strong dissatisfaction at what they get for the £9K a year that most have to pay. My son started university (having taken a gap year) the year they started charging students £9,250.00 a year. My daughter suffered even more because the maintenance grant got removed and turned into yet more loan two years ago and now the government is increasing the interest rate to 6.1%. When the loans were first introduced they were going to be interest free (or a tiny percentage) and now they’ve been index linked to 3% above RPI so it could keep rising. That’s far more than a mortgage interest rate in the current market and I really don’t see how that is fair. Our young people are already suffering with the cost of housing, the lack of wage rises and an unstable economy in general – and cutting the maintenance grant has merely served to affect students from low-income families who are now graduating with the highest student debt levels, often over £57,000. I know of some parents who have already paid off their children’s loans – not sure how – thought it couldn’t be redeemed early? Which again increases the divide between the have’s and have not’s.
In theory the student fees are meant to have provided better education and more lecturers as the universities benefit from far more funding, but that is not the experience my children have had. Admittedly it’s early days, but my daughter had on average four (FOUR!!) lectures a week to go to – with an average of 100 students in each – so if we take the university year into account (four month summer holiday et al) that works out at about £150.00 a lecture for her (multiply that by all the students and that is 15K per lecture for the university!).
This ultimately means that three-quarters of UK university leavers will never pay off their student loans, even if they are still contributing in their 50s, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies which is the highest student debt in the developed world, the IFS said, adding that the benefits of earlier reforms to the tuition fee system — which took pressure off the lowest-earning students — had been wiped out by subsequent changes such as the replacement of maintenance grants with loans. The IFS said that because graduates repaid their student loans at 9 per cent of their earnings, above a certain threshold, and over a 30-year period, in many cases interest accrued on their debt too fast for repayments to keep up.
They are certainly not getting value for money as far as I can see so far.
Is it any wonder that universities in places like Maastricht are seeing a huge rise in UK students applying?? At this rate, our students are all going to leave the UK to hang out in Europe. I don’t blame them. I might join them.
