Paying for 25 year old child

Tabbytabitha · 3 September 2018 at 4:12PM

peachyprice wrote: »

That makes no sense whatsoever.

You believe that instead of paying towards their children's uni expenses people would rather pay a higher mortgage or for a loan they don't need? So they'd end up paying more than if they made a contribution? Really?

To make the system fair all that needs to be changes is for the maintenance loan to allow all students to pay rent and live a very modest existence with a top-up based on income for students from poorer families. That at least puts everyone nearer the same starting position.

Or even better regulate rents for halls to be affordable on a maintenance loan. At the moment we have the ridiculous situation where a student living in London receives a larger maintenance loan and is comfortably able to afford halls and food even if their parents are earning a decent wage while the same student studying in the rest of the country would not receive enough to even cover their rent.

You don't need to actually use the money for something, you'd still have it. Back in the dim and distant (my day) it wasn't uncommon to do this as outgoings (in terms of debts) were taken into account.

Now so many Halls are privately run, you can't regulate prices you have to choose based on budget rather than preference, which many students don't do.

maman · 3 September 2018 at 5:00PM

Tabbytabitha wrote: »

Now so many Halls are privately run, you can't regulate prices you have to choose based on budget rather than preference, which many students don't do.

Our Local Authority is actively working with developers to build private halls of residence. Several blocks have been completed and more are on the way. It's a good policy as it means that many of the former student houses will be freed up for family housing either as private rental or if the landlords decide to sell up.

Unfortunately the halls are mainly full of wealthy Chinese students. I say unfortunately because that market could collapse if our politicians keep giving out messages that people from overseas are unwelcome. I'm guessing that these halls are also very expensive so as yet I don't see many British students in them. However, if they saturate the market they'll maybe have to make the rents realistic to let them.

Spendless · 3 September 2018 at 6:29PM

annandale wrote: »

A student who has a family income over 62k a year will still be eligible for some maintenance loan.

It was almost 4k last year if a student was living away from home and not in London.

So you could have a family who have a student who gets a 4k maintenance loan and their parents earn 100k a year

If someone is from a family who earns up to 25k a year they would have got 8430 in a loan

It is still very much people who are from poorer families who are disadvantaged when it comes to studying at college or university.

Someone from a wealthier family would have got 4502 less a year in a loan than someone whose family were unemployed or had less than 25k a year.

Poverty isn't having a high income which the OP made clear at the outset they do.

Our son comes into this category with the min loan. We are at the lower end of this scale not the 100K+ income. We are paying his accommodation for him, leaving him his loan to live on. He'll have to find work if this isn't enough. Without us doing this, he just couldn't go. One of the Unis we looked at, their cheapest campus accommodation was £6300.

I don't see how on your explanation above it is the poorer student who is disadvantaged? It is the 'richer' student who has parents that can't/won't pay that has the disadvantage.

Spendless · 3 September 2018 at 6:36PM

Tabbytabitha wrote: »

Now so many Halls are privately run, you can't regulate prices you have to choose based on budget rather than preference, which many students don't do.

I queried whether you had to stay in halls of residence during your 1st year. I found Leeds Beckett prices shockingly expensive. I got told it was recommended. As it happens DS chose somewhere different which is cheaper anyway. Even so I looked at private student houses and still found them cheaper (the ones I looked at inc utilities). I'd always had this impression that the halls were the cheapest and this wasn't what I found, so I googles some really old threads on here and found people saying that the 1st year had been the cheapest in halls. This now seems to have changed (as someone earlier said).

Spendless · 3 September 2018 at 6:46PM

Tabbytabitha wrote: »

You have to have been working or claiming benefits in your own name to be eligible - doing an educational course doesn't count towards ut.

Hmmm, so there's no min income you have to have met during this time?

I wonder if the OP DD just missed out on falling into this category? She's 24 (almost 25) and is going into her 4th year, which makes it she started at 20 (nearly 21)

annandale · 4 September 2018 at 12:41AM

Our son comes into this category with the min loan. We are at the lower end of this scale not the 100K+ income. We are paying his accommodation for him, leaving him his loan to live on. He'll have to find work if this isn't enough. Without us doing this, he just couldn't go. One of the Unis we looked at, their cheapest campus accommodation was £6300.

I don't see how on your explanation above it is the poorer student who is disadvantaged? It is the 'richer' student who has parents that can't/won't pay that has the disadvantage.

Because the people who earn 100k, their kids get a loan thats only 4k less than the kids of people who have 25k. I don't think its rocket science to assume people who earn 100k plus have more disposable income than people who earn 25k. The point I was trying to make was, even families who earn a lot of money, their kids can still get a maintenance loan. If someone earned 200k (and a lot more), their kids would still get 4k in a loan. It has always been harder for poor people to go to uni. The stats bear that out. How many kids from poor families go to Oxford or Cambridge for example? Not many I assume.

I mentioned nothing about parents who won't pay in my original tweet did I? 8700 which is the max people from poorer families get, is hardly a fortune is it?

People are always going to be disadvantaged from the off if they come from a poor household. Whereas families who have the money and just won't pay it, they have it. They are choosing not to.

Pretty different from people who earn up to 25k. They don't have the spare cash, that is the difference

Some people from poor families don't get to uni in the first place.

silvercar · 4 September 2018 at 8:49AM

So the rich can afford to support their children and generally will do so.

The poor can't afford to help, but their children receive a relatively generous loan and often university bursaries.

The ones in the middle are the ones that suffer, squeezed by meagre loans, parents with a lot of expenses and not that much income unable or unwilling to support their children.

peachyprice · 4 September 2018 at 9:19AM

silvercar wrote: »

So the rich can afford to support their children and generally will do so.

The poor can't afford to help, but their children receive a relatively generous loan and often university bursaries.

The ones in the middle are the ones that suffer, squeezed by meagre loans, parents with a lot of expenses and not that much income unable or unwilling to support their children.

Spot on.

But hey, some people thing that's a perfectly fair system.

"So Mr Smith, you've lived an honest life, you've paid your taxes since you left school at 16, you've worked yourself into middle management, you've bought your nice 3 bed semi and raised two lovely children. As a reward for your contribution to keeping our economy afloat we're going to penalise your children for whom you want more than a 3 bed semi and middle management. Can't have them benefitting from the same tertiary education as all those poor kids and all those rich kids, can we. Where would that madness lead?"

CruisingSaver · 4 September 2018 at 9:45AM

Spendless wrote: »

I queried whether you had to stay in halls of residence during your 1st year. I found Leeds Beckett prices shockingly expensive. I got told it was recommended. As it happens DS chose somewhere different which is cheaper anyway. Even so I looked at private student houses and still found them cheaper (the ones I looked at inc utilities). I'd always had this impression that the halls were the cheapest and this wasn't what I found, so I googles some really old threads on here and found people saying that the 1st year had been the cheapest in halls. This now seems to have changed (as someone earlier said).

Leeds Beckett were by far the most expensive halls of all the universities we visited, for no particular reason that I could fathom, other than the university being very focussed on their bottom line!

I think University of Edinburgh was the cheapest despite being quite an expensive city to live in.

annandale · 4 September 2018 at 10:10AM

Someone would give up a full time job so their child would get 4k more of a student loan? There is nothing about that that makes sense. Leaving yourself 10k plus a year worse off in earnings so that a child would get 4k more of a student loan

My exs family were very wealthy. He saw none of that. No way did they give the true figures of what they were worth to student finance. If they had he would have got no grant.

8.7k a year is not a generous loan in my view. As for extra help what bursaries do poor kids get these days.

How do you know people in the middle are squeezed by loans and don't have much to spare?

As I said before. My mum was a single parent and helped put two of us through university. She worked full time but was not a high wage earner.

I got no extra help because of this. The only people I knew who did were people whose parents were unemployed.

Massive generalisation to say that it's easier for people of poorer parents to go through uni than people who work in middle management. You are surmising that people of a certain income level have high outgoings compared to income.

Statistics show that it's harder for kids from poor backgrounds to get to university in the first place.

The numbers are rising. At least in Scotland.

Paying for 25 year old child

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