Don't read this if you're my mum.
David Cameron has made my life a bit harder. Probably I'm not the only one who could say that. But this is how he's made life harder for me.
Unless I'm wrong (and this is very possible, as I don't keep up with the detail of British life any more), if you want to go to university in England, you now have to pay 9,000 pounds a year. Or borrow it. Now this is where it's a bummer for me. We have three children hurtling downhill towards college age. Without wanting to assume that they will all want to go to college, but thinking it's likely, that means that either they will have to each take on a debt of 27,000 before launching into adult life, or we will have to find 81,000. Neither of those is a very attractive prospect.
Here's the crunch. University education in the US is fearsomely expensive, but because it has always been that way, a whole system of support has grown up. There are academic scholarships, sports scholarships, loan schemes, and - most importantly for us - tuition remission for family of university employees. The university that Husband teaches at is very egalitarian, so that if you are the janitor and have ten children, they all receive tuition remission (worth about $15,000 a year, for four years). I like that. It's a huge perk. The university has some very loyal janitors, who in real terms are extremely well paid. In our case, that means that I am doing my MA degree pretty much for free (though there are tax implications, which puts it at a few hundred dollars - but in the context of saving $15,000, I'm not complaining). Which is all a preamble to saying that if we decided to stay here long-term - and Mum, since I know you will be reading this in spite of the opening instruction, we aren't - but if we did decide to stay here, we would instantly be looking at saving the family 81,000 pounds. That is not to be sneezed at.
So expletives to you, David Cameron, because you've made it really very attractive in financial terms to stay here. Expletives to you.
Am I up to date with the reality of the situation? Are universities all charging 9,000 pounds as from next year? Is Scotland doing the same, of is this just England (we've always fancied going back to Scotland, and this would be one big incentive). Are universities focusing any efforts on introducing more scholarships? Are any of them thinking about tuition remission for their employees?
For those of you wanting the challenge of a harder question, is it worth 81,000 pounds to us to be living in England, near family, near places we love, near old friends, in a culture we feel more at home with, where you can get a decent cup of tea at will, where John Humphries is on the radio every morning, where you are but a few hours away from mainland Europe, on an island you share with the Lake District, the Scottish Highlands and a whole lot of fabulous coastline, where we can vote, where we feel most who we are, and in whose soil we ultimately want our children to have their roots? Or used to.
How much is that worth? Answer THAT one, David Cameron.
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you can borrow the money at low rates, and if you don't earn above £21k pa you don't pay it back. Any debt remaining after 30 years is written off. Scotland is not adopting this lunacy.
ReplyDeleteThat makes me feel a little better. I don't see why higher earners shouldn't pay back university fees (not that 21K is hugely high earning). I just don't like the idea of my kids setting out on adult life saddled with large debts. That's such a millstone.
DeleteAnonymous is right about being able to borrow it, but as far as I know, re Scottish universities, if you're English you have to pay the same fees as you would in a UK uni. I'm in Ireland, where we have no fees but a "student services charge" of €2000, but because we don't have "fees", our citizens do not pay fees in Scotland. You're welcome to come here!
ReplyDeleteI wonder how they define Scottish. Is it by living in Scotland? If we were living in Scotland, would the children go to university for free? Or if you were born in Scotland (as two of my children were), does that count? So could we live in England, but those two children attend university in Scotland for free? And who knows how that may all change in 2013 anyway.
DeleteThanks for the invitation!
This is so interesting to me, because Son#2 attends an international school here in Seoul where many of the children hope to attend Uni in the UK precisely because it is (or was) so much cheaper than the US!!!
ReplyDeleteIota, I can't find the definition written down but I was told verbally that living in Scotland for three years before application was necessary to qualify. While I am not sure if that is right, It's definitely not just being born there. I'm Scottish but living in midlands and would love it if daughter followed me to Glasgow uni, that would be much cheaper if we lived up there again!
ReplyDeleteI think they are planning to cut round Scotland with a stanley knife(does that translate?) and set it adrift with a bit more coastline anyway - or at least that is what Mr Salmon would like. Head firmly in sand about uni fees here, and hoping mine take up hairdressing/plumbing/car maintenance traineeships.
ReplyDeletex J
More coastline. Yay!
DeleteStanley knife doesn't translate. Who was Stanley anyway?
Thanks. Yes, "fear" is the word.
ReplyDeleteI think lots of people are looking at apprenticeships now instead.
ReplyDeleteIt's a scary amount of money - also the question about whether parents should pay just in case their child doesn't end up a high earner and can get a part of it written off
ReplyDeleteI do hope things start to move more to towards a US model where there is more opportunity to gain scholarships and the such like
Move here!!! Move here!!! Move here!!! Because the Scottish position is thus. If you are Scottish (by residence*, not blood, or at least not yet blood, anyway), you don't pay anything if you go to a Scottish university. You do pay if you go South. If you are English (again by residence, not blood, so it's no good rechristening your children Hamish McSporran or something) and you go to a Scottish university you pay. If you are French, or German, or indeed anything else in the EU and you go to a Scottish university you, wait for it, DON'T PAY!!!
ReplyDeleteWhich is, expletive, ridiculous. But fine for me, Jack, because we live here. At least until Mr Salmond gets his Stanley knife out.
Of course the situation will doubtless have changed by the time my kids get there, but yours should be ok (or at least some of them...). Maybe.
*I've had a look and the requirement seems to be "ordinarily resident" so you don't have to have been here for any particular length of time. Go on. Move here!
Funnily enough, we were talking about renaming our oldest Hamish McSporran only the other day.
ReplyDeleteNah. Don't. Hamish Manhattan is far more multi-cultural.
DeleteFirstly, you also have the issue that you need to have been resident in the UK for, I think 2 yrs, before starting uni to avoid paying FOREIGNER fees as opposed to residents' fees, so that's another consideration for you. I thought the reason loads of English kids were applying to Scotttish unis was cos they didn't have the same level of fees.... Secondly it's true if you never earn above 21k you don't pay anything on the debt & anyway it's written off after 30 yrs. May I point out here the UK average salary is £26,000, so for a graduate 21,000 is pretty low (apart from one's 1st few years. That's abt what teachers start on) but you can also receive this amount tax free in benefits in the UK, so that wd be another way to avoid paying back the fees. (That is one of the reasons Albania's trafficking racket is now trafficking single mothers wth children or a child to the UK because it's so lucrative [& they don't have to lock the women into a brothel & take away their passport....] )
ReplyDeleteThe problem stems from Labour's policy of wanting 50% of school leavers to go to uni (wch also conveniently helps keep down unemployment figures). I think it's currently at 40%. In our day only 6% went on to uni so it was affordable to fund grants & uni fees. Same issue with NHS, too big a population, too many old people make it impossible for govts to fund it all unless we have very high taxes.
Oh & another matter, the national average age for 1st time buyers is now 37, yes 37. My point is Britain is incredibly expensive, it's grotty, wth gloomy damp weather, you can't afford to do anything nice here on an average salary cos it all goes in taxes, fuel bills, petrol etc (& uni fees) & being near friends & family, whilst nice, I'm not sure that it makes it worth all the rubbish that goes with living here in my opinion.
I meant uni undergads is at 40% not unemployement figures! I don't think there's anything wrong with more people doing apprenticeships or going straight out to work if you can get a job. Why does everyone have to go to uni? But the fees are prohibitive i agree. The problem with the gov't sayign unis can charge "up to £9000" a yr for fees, menas every uni will charge that cos to make it less implies the suggestion that they are not as good a uni & can't charge the high fees. Hoenstly, it's an iniquitous system. I don't know what the answer is though. end of rant & burble.
ReplyDeleteWe're about to fork out on private schooling. Uni fees seem cheap in comparison
ReplyDeleteI was thinking about this earlier during a brief (and more to the point peaceful) visit to the loo. To put my three through university would cost the same. And by the time they're of university age the fees will probably have gone up and they might rack up a total of £100k debt between them before any loans they've had to take out for living costs are counted too. I turn the argument on its head and wonder if university is necessary at all. Unless children harbour firm ambitions to do something professional which requires a degree and professional training (doctor, lawyer, etc) maybe spending three years getting a degree in something and still being unemployable after that isn't the answer. My ideal plan is to encourage my children to think creatively about how they want to earn their money, and if that means working for themselves and not following the standard educational route I think it's a good thing. The days of relying on big companies for secure employment are largely over and I think we all have to make our own opportunities more than ever.
ReplyDeleteI think it's very sad tuition fees are so high now, every country needs well educated people to run it and we need to invest in the people who will run our future. But maybe fewer people need to do degrees as well. I remember the students who dossed about at uni and would have been better off actually getting a job instead (I on the other hand always worked hard *cough*).
I was in the final wave of British students who, if you weren't from a well off family, got their fees and basic living expenses paid in grant form. I have had some grave doubts about where education has been going for some time in the UK: under Labour, as well as the Tories! :-)
ReplyDeleteI can only echo HOM. Looking at private school fees makes uni fees seem bearable.
ReplyDeleteI have just totally ignored all of this and poked fun at Ed Miliband instead with some others. I invite you to do the same, if for no other reason than a) it is ridiculous, and b) free laughs.
ReplyDeletehttp://londonmum.standard.co.uk/2012/02/why-make-believe-is-much-more-fun-than-reality.html
LCM x
The papers (and by papers, of course, I mean websites and including the BBC and similar) have been really bad and mis-informative about this, implying (which is not true) that you will have to pay the money up front, as in America. They seem to want to shock and scare people into doing exactly the sort of sums that you were doing here, and get people in a lather so as to panic and, well, I don't really know what they really want people to do. It has, of course, never been "free" to attend university, and the £9000 per annum is, in many institutions and on many science-y lab-based courses, still not actually enough to balance the costs of educating a student. All that is being done with this is shifting more of the "tax" towards University fees onto the backs of those who actually attend University, rather than the entire British population. Given how generous they are with the loans and the loan re-payment terms, it's still a better deal than for someone like me, whose middle class American parents earned too much and saved too much for me to be eligible for any loans for my University education at a medium-rate state University!
ReplyDelete(btw, sorry I've dropped off the earth, I've been really bad about reading blogs since Bloglines disappeared and took away my "system" of what I've read lately and what I need to catch up on!)
Its a logistical nightmare, I have three children and although Uni is a long way off I still have no idea about how we/they will pay for it.
ReplyDeleteI however have started to wonder how much University is a must do, I was educated in the states and the UK at college and am not sure how much of it made me the person I am today and if it aided my career choice.
Blimey now you have made me think on a school night!