The Sunday Times recently published an article on how much a parent needs to spend on subsidising their daughter or son when at university (Anderson 2024). As you will be aware, the amount of maintenance loan that a student gets depends on their parent’s income. The maximum loan that a student will receive outside of London is £4,767 if their parents earn more than £70,000 a year and for a parent who earns less than £25,000 a year the maximum loan is £10,227 a year. The money management website Save the Student has calculated that for a student living away from home outside of London spends an average of £1,078 a month including rent. UCAS agree with this and believe that the annual cost can be up to £13,000. Based on this figure, for parents with an income of £30,000 a year, their son or daughter would get a loan of up to £9,497 outside of London. Thus, they would have to subsidise them by £3,439. Of course, better off parents would have to subsidise by a larger amount.  Parents with an income of over £70,000 would for instance,  have to subsidise by £8,169 for a university located outside of London.

The Sunday Times article pointed out that the above subsidies are averages and that at some universities the cost of rent in halls can be over £10,000 a year. Consequently, many students live in private accommodation but then they often face travel costs. The NUS has found that the cost of travel can often be a quarter of a student’s weekly budget with most students paying between £11 and £30 a week on travel.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies, (Ogden and Waltmann 2023),have calculated that the maintenance loan amount in England fell by 10 per cent in real terms between 2021 and 2023 while the lower parental earnings threshold of £25,000 has remained the same since 2008 – thus bringing fewer parents into the higher maximum loans.

So, what do students from the Fens whose parents have an annual income of less than £30,000 a year and cannot afford a subsidy of about £3,439 do? They can take a gap year and work in a food processing plant, but they will need to earn over £10,000 to cover the 3 years of a degree. My experience as a HE advisor at a FE college is that many young people who have gone into employment with the initial intention of going to university, after a year of work rarely do so , having experienced work, very few students apply to university a year later.  A few might get bursaries but most of those students who do wish to go to university will have to work part time while studying.  HEPI produced a report, (Freeman 2023) indicating that in that year over 55% of students had part time jobs and worked for an average of 13.5 hours a week. They pointed out that working while studying poses significant risks that could impact on the quality of their studies. Thus, this is just another barrier for young people who come from deprived, non- traditional backgrounds.

References

Anderson, E. (2024), Rent, food, books, beer: how much should you give your child for university? ,The Sunday Times, September 15, p.10

Freeman, J. (2023), How to beat a cost of learning crisis: Universities support for students, HEPI. In https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2023/09/14/how-to-beat-a-cost-of-learning-crisis-universities-support-for-students/

Ogden K and Waltmann, B (2023), Student Loans In England explained and options for reform, Institute for Fiscal Studies, In https://ifs.org.uk/articles/student-loans-england-explained-and-options-reform