Student Finance Advice

tuckerwill00 · 13 December 2018 at 7:21PM

Hi, I have applied to study quantity surveying at university starting this coming September and need to start thinking about student finance. The course will be 4 years long with the 3rd year being a placement year. On average, students studying this course at the university I am going to earn £15,000 in their placement year. They also have a 100% employment rate 6 months after graduating (down to the fact that most students continuing to work for their placement year employers) with the average starting salary of £29,000.
I currently have personal savings of roughly £35,000 and can't decide whether to take the maintance loan and the tuition fee loan or just the tuition fee loan. I think I could easily survive through uni on savings, coming out the other end with about £14,000 of savings and £27,000 in debt rather then £57,000 debt and £41,000 savings (Including salary of placement year). I feel that if I do get a graduate job on this kind of salary, I could purposefully pay off my £27,000 debt in the first 3 years after graduating and still live and then be free from debt without having to have paid much interest. But then I could also take all the possible loan and then hope that I don't ever pay it all off. However, being a quantity surveyor, I expect I would have paid it off naturally in the 30 years due to the decent salaries.

Please could I have some advice on whether to take the maintance loan or not. Thanks, Will.

silvercar · 14 December 2018 at 12:13AM

Difficult one, but the comparison you should be making is between taking everything you can and taking nothing. The worst of both worlds is to take a large loan and spend all your savings...and then find the rest of the loan you could have taken will be written off in any case.

tacpot12 · 14 December 2018 at 1:38AM

Good question, silvercar has provided a good answer, but I wanted to suggest that you also consider what will happen if you take all you can or take nothing, under the best scenario and the worst scenario, as well as an "average" scenario.

The best scenario is that you complete your placement year, graduate with a First Class degree, start your first job on more that £29,000 and receive better than average pay rises!

The worst case might be that you drop off the course at the end of the second year, and then go on to earn just enough to have to payback the loan over the maximum term. There may be other scenarios that produce a worst outcome for you, so I would do some more investigating into what the worst scenario could be.

You also need to temper any consideration of the best, worst and average scenarios with your thoughts on how likely it is that they will occur; they don't have the same likelihood.

I did a placement year as part of my degree and thoroughly enjoyed it. I particularly benefited from the break from studying in the third year and believe that I got a better degree as a result. I returned to my placement employer on graduating. I though it was very useful for both employer and employee to get a good look at each other before deciding if the relationship was going to be a long term one.

Good luck with the Student Finance decision and with your degree.

Cash-Cows · 17 December 2018 at 5:06PM

If you use your savings you delay the opportunity to buy a house after you graduate. I think it would be foolish to use your savings this way. Read the Martin Lewis articles on this site.

Student Finance Advice

Comments

Categories

Get our FREE Weekly email full of deals & guides - and it’s spam-free