Please could someone give advice

cupid_s

With student fees as they are now, the cost of accommodation and bills are far outweighed by any other costs that she would face if living at home anyway.
The difference that living at home would actually make would probably be less than 2.5k a year. Book costs will still be the same, travel costs at home will probably be more (as most students live within walking distance of where they study), tuition fees are still riduculously high and going out will possibly be a bit more expensive (as there's thing like not being able to share taxis in a large group etc).
I am at uni now and just about to go into my seventh year of study and was lucky to not have to pay these top up fees. But I can honestly say that if i was of the age where i was going to be starting an undergrad course at uni in the near future, i wouldn't be going. That's probably because i'm a scientist and with a science degree you earn rubbish money. Hence me now being stuck in a spiral of further education so at least i can get a job and make my first degree not worthless.
But make sure that she really looks at what jobs she will be qualified to do when she finishes the course she's interested in. I know lots of people who did different courses at uni and are now working in pubs and call centres despite getting very good degrees from very good unis. Firstly because they didn't actually realise that for a lot of things further qualification are needed and also because so many people have a degree now there is so much competition. Sometimes a degree really isn't worth it. I kinda wish i'd never done mine because I am really bored of studying now.

Volcano

7 years studying yet you can pay off a £68K mortgage in the next 5 years?

We feel your pain, really we do......

kittiwoz

Volcano wrote:

If you have a top class uni like UEA on your doorstep then you really should consider that first before an art school, if she does decide to stay in Norwich.

For an arts course such as graphics a specialist art school may well offer better provision than a university. It would be wrong to look down on art schools, some have excellent reputations, for example the Royal College of Arts and Central St. Martin's. The standard of courses varies from place to place for different disciplines, for example Bucks College is known to have a good furniture course but is less respected in other areas. If possible I would recommend she visits part two of next year's new designers exhibition which will take place at the Business Design Centre in Islington (near Angel tube station) next July 12-15th to look at the graphics work being exhibited and get an idea of what different courses are producing. Here is a link to the website including a list of which colleges are already down to exhibit. You have to select "Graphic Design and Interactive Media" from the dropdown menu "filter by zone:".

Also some the reputatuion of different colleges varies for profision of foundation degrees in Art and Design and although financial constraints might limit her choices more in this area I still think it is something she needs to do some research into. The standard of art provison in schools generally has really dropped because it is an expensive subject to teach and has been sidelined in favour of core curriculum. Graphics is often delivered as little more than product packaging and quite badly taught, often by people for whom it is a secondary or even tertiary subject. A foundation degree in art and design would really expand her understanding of the subject and her aproach to design and give her improved technical skills. It would also help prevent any costly mistakes in choosing the wrong degree programme. She would find out whether she really wants to pursue graphic design or branch of into another area and her tutors would help her apply to higher education degree courses using their knowledge of the courses available and the standard of her work. They would also help her to put together a portfolio of her work and wouls have knowledge of the application routes into art and design of which there are two, route A (UCAS) and route B which is particularly for art and design and reflects the greater importance of interview and portfolio to art and design courses over GCSE and A-level grades.

kittiwoz

Insomnia sucks. I made a jetpak with lots of links to graphic design stuff. Mostly it is not to do with courses but it is just stuff I thought might be interesting to someone who is interested in graphics. I put in a little bit of illustration stuff too. Hopefully you use firefox rather than internet explorer. If not you can download it free here, it is better than IE. It's more secure and you can get add-ons (like Jeteye which lets you drag and drop elements from different websites into a Jetpak and annotate them like an online scrap-book). You can view the jetpak in IE but it looks really ropey.

pavlovs_dog

on the financial side of things, only one third or one quarter of the student loan is means tested - so she would get some money, just not the full whack.

there will also be all sorts of scholarships and bursaries she can try for; even if it is only a small financial reward, it all helps lessen the load.

and then there is the part time job. once she turns 16 she should easily be able to manage a few hours a week without it affecting her studies. its good to start building up the cv, learning skills that future employees will value whilst learning how the working world works and what it is like to handle money. it will make her more financially independant from you - perhaps she may even see the sense in saving for uni? a lot of my peers did, especially during our a levels.

part time work whilst at uni is a necessity for most. some do it to build the cv, some for beer money, others just to break even. if she can get work that relates to her chosen field of work, all the better.

unfortunately, for most, debt and uni go hand in hand. how bad her level of debt is depends on the lifestyle she chooses to lead. if you can teach her how to strike a balance between being financially savvy and having the student life, she will do fine.

on a debt management front, if she is to run up debt, try to ensure it is student loan debt and not overdrafts/credit cards, as these generally have the worst APRs and will cause the biggest debt.

Wendy1_2

Thanks for all the advice.
She is good at Maths and i would love her to do something with that as i think this would offer more and better job prospects/choices.
However it ultimately must be her choice and i can only offer guidance
i just dont want her to do a graphics degree, end up in lots of debt for not much prospect at the end of it
i could be completely wrong and it is her choice
Unfortunately, I have no experience of universities or further education and would hate her to make a very expensive mistake.

cupid_s

Volcano wrote:

7 years studying yet you can pay off a £68K mortgage in the next 5 years?

We feel your pain, really we do......

So what do you think is a good wage to be on after 7 years full time studying?

The only reason we can pay off our mortgage is because even though we don't earn a fortune from our studentships we have been saving loads ever since we took it out so we can make overpayments. And we go without a lot so we can do this.

Obviously we have no kids which I know are a big expense, and aren't really planning to in the timeframe you state simply because of cost. We don't have a car, we don't have sky tv or internet access as we would rather go without these and pay extra off our mortgage, we budget on everything we do and always have done ever since we started going out together 5 years ago.

I think it's pretty impressive on my part that I can effectively pay 12k mortgage a year when me and hubby earned 19k last year and will only earn 21k this year and I'm quite proud of myself. Please don't knock my efforts

pavlovs_dog

cupid_stunt wrote:

I think it's pretty impressive on my part that I can pay 12k mortgage a year when me and hubby earned 19k last year and will only earn 21k this year and I'm quite proud of myself. Please don't knock my efforts

i agree, very impressive.

if you dont mind me asking cupid_stunt, how did you manage to get a mortgage on such a low income?

cupid_s

thanks pavlovs_dog!

both me and hubby did our undergrad degrees and then while i went and did my masters he got a job for a year. He was earning £14000 during this time and we got our mortgage based on those earnings.

The bank gave us £71000, which is obviously more than 5 times what his salary was. But the bank said we could have up to 96k! They said they were taking into account the fact that I was getting some student funding which would continue through my PhD.

cupid_s

and our income now is about 20k so the mortgage we have is only 3.5 times out joint income