The Cost of Learning

One thing that annoys me about my time at University is the fact that other people seem to think it was easy.  When it comes to finance, myself and many others came out the other side of University with a degree and a mountain of debt.  Time and again I hear the same response, usually from people who have never been or who went a very long time ago: "But you only pay it back when you earn so much" - bitch University is expensive, the loans are not enough to live off, most students have part time jobs, or full time jobs, and they have credit cards and overdrafts to be able to survive.  It takes more money to make it through University than you get in loans.  It is not possible to make it through University on student loans without another source of income, either from savings, or employment, or support from family and friends.

I went to University in 2006 and in order to get there I had to sell shares and use an overdraft on my bank account until my student loan came in.  Once it did, the bulk of it disappeared immediately in accommodation fees to the University.  It was only by getting a student account with an interest free overdraft that I was able to survive my first year.  At the end of the year that student account was overdrawn by almost a thousand pounds.  My first year wasn't exactly wild either, the only social events I really went to were during freshers with friends from halls and beyond that mostly events run by the LGBT Society at University.

While the first year of University left a financial impact on me it was only the beginning.  In my second year my rent in London was £552 per [4 week] month which was £7,176 for the year, that was excluding bills and was a sizeable step up from my first year.  Overdrafts increased, credit card usage increased, and I worked a full time job in retail at Woolworths to make it through and I still came out of second year in more debt than I had after my first year.

My final year was a similar story and by the end I was in almost £6k debt.  While the bulk of that was interest free it did not stay that way.  Some began charging interest after graduation, some deferred it for a year.  I walked away from University with a degree and a mountain of debt, real debt, not student loan debt.  The latter of which if you are interested sent me my annual statement a few weeks ago letting me know I owe them just under £32k.  I studied at University when tuition fees were £3k a year, and when maintenance grants were still a thing - which I qualified for on top of my loans and did not have to repay.  If I had studied at University just a few years later after reforms were made I would have had to pay fees of £9k a year, and I would have to repay higher maintenance loans wich were introduced to make up for the grants that were scrapped.  All in all, with interest my student loan balance today would be sitting at £58k.

University costs money and the loans do not cover all expenses.  Education is treated as a commodity and there are often times I find myself asking what was the point.  There are dozens of Universities in the UK who confer degrees that are not worth the paper they are written on.  There are thousands of graduates every year who leave University to find themselves unemployed.  Students are sold a degree on the promise of the better chance at employment it gives them and the higher up the career ladder they can climb and the promise they won't have to repay their debts until they earn a certain amount.  Students are being mis-sold their degrees.  Thousands graduate University to unemployment, their degrees don't help them enter their fields, employers want experience not education, and they leave with a mountain of debt on top of their student loans which they do have to repay immediately regardless of income, and when you are unemployed that seals you into a debt trap.

If I was to reform higher education I would introduce a higher education curriculum and a University license which every higher education institution would have to adhere to and hold respectively.  Failure to adhere to a standardised curriculum to ensure quality and failure to retain their license would result in Universities being closed.  Education needs to have its benefits restored.  The purpose of education is to give people a better chance in life, if it isn't doing that it's not working.  People often get lost in criticism of primary and secondary education and scrutiny of their national curriculum and the relevance of the subjects they are taught - this scrutiny needs to be applied to further and higher education as well.  The same arguments levied at compulsory education as to relevance, and quality, and accountability of those delivering the courses needs to extend to all education.  The fact that higher education has survived this long escaping that scrutiny when it costs so much to pursue not just to the individuals but to government and to taxpayers is nigh on incredulous.