I love Open Day season. I’m a jeopardy junkie.
Events are full of unpredictability – from student protests, to building maintenance, to which shop will sell out of sandwiches first.
One thing, however, is totally predictable. As we set out the brochures on our Student Finance stand, I guarantee that by the end of the day hundreds of parents living in England will have stared at me in total shock.
It is a little easier with Welsh families. Their funding package gets you within around £1,000 of a sensible student annual budget. But the English package inspires a mixture of terror, depression and disbelief.
Contributions
According to the Office for National Statistics, median household income after direct taxation but before housing costs and other expenses was £36,663 in 2024. At this level, an English applicant would be entitled to a maintenance loan of around £9,028. With average standard student housing (not ensuite and a 40-week contract), £6,640 would go on rent leaving £2,388 to live on (just under £60 a week for 40 weeks). Alternatively, this family has to find nearly £4,500 a year to top up to an average student budget of £13,500 per annum. (Save the Student’s National Student Money Survey actually sets this is a tiny bit higher).
At £65,000 household income, a family is solidly into minimum loan territory in England. They will have to find closer to £8,500 per year to top up their student. Congratulations if you are saving anything close to £1,000 of your take-home pay a month. Most of us raising a family and paying a mortgage are not.
Hopefully, you won’t blink when your young person rings you up from school to say you need to pay a £500 accommodation deposit within 24 hours several months before they even have a fully confirmed place. I’m not joking. It happened to me. Really bad luck if you have twins or had your children close together. Thankfully I have four school years between my two, though this was not financial planning but recovery time from the total shock of first parenthood.
A question of worth
Back to student finance shocks. Wherever my English visitors are in the table of household residual income, they quickly become very invested in the question “Is it worth it?” There are huge direct and opportunity costs to most families supporting a young person through university. One lady actually cried because she could not immediately see how she was going to make it happen. Lots of families come to our stand while their young person is in a separate subject talk so that they can talk to us without betraying how tight their finances are.
Of course, young people do save or earn before and during university, but those things are, like my open days, unpredictable. We have built a student finance system in England (if you can really call it that) with what the Americans would call an Expected Family Contribution. Only the student finance agencies don’t call it that and you have to rely on Martin Lewis to model it.
I can defend the value of HE with the best of the UK sales force (sorry, I mean Schools and Colleges Liaison Team). Yet the more time I spend explaining it, the more I see the student finance system from the shocked parental perspective. They do worry about whether it will be worth it in the long term. They are preoccupied with interest rates even though they should be focusing on manageable monthly repayments, but they can’t think logically because they are still recovering from the shock of what the three years right in front of them are going to cost.
I was thinking of getting a puppy and kitten therapy booth for our October open days – but my budget won’t cover it.
