Student loans payback to be extended to 40 years

[seeformiles]

My university experience may as well have taken place on another planet. Full grant, claiming dole in the summer and housing benefit all year round and leaving with just £400 in debt! I’ve held jobs that have asked for a “good honours degree” at application stage but could easily be done by someone with decent O-levels - the degree demand was a sifting exercise and a reflection of how poorly employers regarded GCSEs at the time. As for wages - the highest I ever earned was £26k pa which was way below the average graduate wage. My current job is part time (£20k pro rats) and brings in about £12k. Uni was good experience but I’m so lucky to have been born at the right time so it wasn’t a financial gamble. Were I 18 again with the same family circumstances, there’s no way I’d be going neither would I recommend it to 18 year olds either. I worked in Uni admin for 20 years and saw how the institution changed from a place that had high standards and proper academic rigour into a cynical “bums on seats” exercise as demographic crunch meant it fought with other unis over an ever decreasing pool of 18 year olds. In doing so, their standards vanished and they convinced completely unqualified people that Uni was the place for them, knowing that they would fail but keeping them for enough time to get the funding and their cash. It was a thoroughly dishonest practice and they were by no means alone in inflating degree grades to look better on league tables but also to where they’re pretty meaningless and are now the new A-levels. They sold people who could Ill afford it a complete crock of shit and false post-grad career expectations - most of our students with non vocational degrees were working in sweat-shop call centres 3 months after graduation. Still annoys me thinking about it now and glad I don’t work in the sector anymore.

 

[Sasaferrato]

The whole going to University business is a rip off from course costs and loans, accommodation costs and a huge rental market that inflates affordability and decreases housing options for locals, to the latest attacks on lecturers pensions. Should be replaced with a system based on the Open University/ old Russian correspondence courses.

The Vice Chancellors need to get their salaries from somewhere.

See how your uni Vice Chancellor's pay compares to everyone else's

The country's highest-paid uni boss is currently doing talks in Davos, obvs

thetab.com

 

[rubbershoes]

Our plan was to send our children to university in Europe. Obviously to a course taught in English. The fees are a fraction of what they are here.

For some reason, that option isn't available now.

I went to university with fees paid and I even got a grant. My postgraduate course also had the fees paid by the local authority, but I think mine was the last year they paid them. My eldest wants to go into a field where you definitely need a degree, do she's going to have to incur the debt. The others don't know what they want to do and it's impossible to advise them whether they should go to uni.

 

[marty21]

Our plan was to send our children to university in Europe. Obviously to a course taught in English. The fees are a fraction of what they are here.

For some reason, that option isn't available now.

I went to university with fees paid and I even got a grant. My postgraduate course also had the fees paid by the local authority, but I think mine was the last year they paid them. My eldest wants to go into a field where you definitely need a degree, do she's going to have to incur the debt. The others don't know what they want to do and it's impossible to advise them whether they should go to uni.

I did a PGCE in 94/95 & the fees were paid , even got a Mature Student Grant of about £5k .

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I did my degree as a mature student just before the cut off for the decent loans (never paid back, written off after 25 years I think it was), no fees and even had maintenance grant my flights out to China for the year abroad paid for by LEA. Did change my life as had absolutely no Chinese beforehand and now I've lived here half my life but it's not made me any money, in that I earned more in semi-skilled manual back home as a youth than anything I've done due to a fancy degree in a foreign language classical and modern. If you were starting out now about the only thing it would help with is security services jobs I'd think, maybe part of a joint honours with something like finance if you wanted to get into banking but there's enough bilingual by heritage people with practical skills to fill most posts.

Similar story for me. Got around half loan, half grant. And I felt hard done-by given it would have been a full grant a few years earlier. Little did I know about what was coming. I not only had flights out on my year abroad paid for, they also paid for me to come back here for Christmas.

I didn't do it thinking I'd get better-paid work afterwards. I did it because I was interested in the learning. I think everyone who wants it deserves a length of time learning for the sake of learning. It's horrible that education is rarely spoken of in those terms any more.

As others have said, it feels like we come from a different planet from young people today. It feels mad to saddle yourself with all that debt, but I guess if that's what everyone is doing, you do it as well.