Financing my degree

Hey there

I'm in year 12, starting to look at universities and make some serious decisions about what I'm going to do. My issue is being able to pay for it. I qualify for a tuition fee loan like everybody else, however I qualify for least amount of a student loan, due to my family's high household income. Unfortunately, my parents spent the money they had saved up for me to go to uni on sending me to boarding school, and my younger brother will be going to private school next year. This basically means that I'm going to have no money from my parents when I'm at uni.The estimate for my student loan is only about £3,700, which isn't even enough to cover rent at any of the uni's I want to study at. My parents say that I should take a gap year, but I really don't want to do that before university. Can I get through my degree on this student loan plus a part-time job??

Thanks x

Reply 1

IAmYourdog

huh.
Are you sure you can only get £3,700 from a student loan? You should be entitled to the maximum loan regardless of your household income (I think is in region of £5000). What will affect you is the maintenance grant - (money you don't have to pay back and is mean-tested based on your household income).
Now if your going to be living in student accomodation it's going to be in the region £4000-5000 (depending on what sort of accomodation you choose). The living costs whilst at uni will be in excess of £3,500 in my opinion (food will cost you £1250). You've got books to pay for, excess travel expenses, social life (if you choose to have one), clothes etc.
You are going to need to a part time job to survive regardless on whether you budget well.
If your on a intensive course like engineering then I think you won't be enjoying student life as much.
If your on like an art course or something - where you'll have loads of free time you could get a part time job and work like 15+ hours a week right? :h:

*Whilst I've been writing this I've found out that people with high household incomes don't get the full maintenance loan (I live in the north so none of the kids in my school aren't recieving money from grants :P)
But if your parents earning over 70k I'm pretty certain they can make cut-backs every month to contribute to their daughters education, if they can't they don't care about you.