Anybody who has recently experienced the UK university system as a student or parent – I have with my four children – didn’t need to be told that relying solely on maintenance loans to cover student living expenses is simply impossible.
Nevertheless, the Higher Education Policy Institute report published last week on “A minimum income standard for students” brought home just how big the shortfall now is: from £6,482 a year for a Welsh student who receives the maximum level of support to £13,865 a year for an English student eligible for the smallest maintenance loan.
Even an English student receiving the maximum loan would have to work nearly 19 hours a week on minimum wage to cover all their living costs, according to the study, carried out by researchers at Loughborough University.
So how should the shortfall be made up? Solutions could involve capping student numbers so that existing government-funded maintenance support could be concentrated on fewer students. Degree courses could, alternatively, be concentrated into fewer years, so that less maintenance support would be required. This, again, would enable the yearly amount to be set at a higher level without increasing the overall debt burden.
But the report recommends, instead, an increase in the maximum level of maintenance loan without any other changes to the system. I think this is a grave mistake. Encouraging students – especially students from the poorest backgrounds – to get into even higher levels of unsecured debt should not be taken nearly so lightly.
We seem to have thrown out all common sense when it comes to student loans. We are encouraging our youngsters to be completely blasé about graduating with debts of £50,000 to £100,000. My generation is guilty of having created a fool’s paradise in which students are discouraged from thinking of their debts as real. But they are real, and have to be paid back: in England, the repayment period is now 40 years, accounting for 9 per cent of your income above the lowered earnings threshold of £25,000.
To be fair, the Hepi report also suggests that students can be reasonably expected to work part-time as well, provided that it doesn’t interfere with their studies. So at what level is interference likely? If the experience of our children and their friends is typical, there can be as few as eight contact hours per week. Of course, there is studying to be done in addition, and some subjects, such as medicine and engineering, have many more structured teaching hours. But most courses really can’t be realistically called full-time. So it isn’t unreasonable to expect the large majority of students to commit to two eight-hour work shifts a week during term time. Indeed, most universities are content with their students working up to 15 hours: one more will hardly make a difference.
In addition, the standard undergraduate experience involves long holidays at Christmas, Easter and summer, adding up to five or even six months of the year, depending on exam timetables. If students worked full-time (40 hours a week) for just three of those months (12 weeks), that would add up to just over 1,000 hours. Even on a modest wage of £10 per hour, that would accrue nearly £10,000 a year.
There is, perhaps, a risk of too many students fighting for an insufficient number of available casual work hours. But aren’t we always told that the UK needs cheap unskilled labour from abroad to fill vacancies? Surely there must be a way of encouraging employers to take on students instead, where they can?
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As in most areas of life, of course, the richer students will have life easier as they will be more likely to have their income supplemented sufficiently by their parents, so will not have to find work. But going to work isn’t all bad; it prepares you for future working life, and you can learn so much from your casual work experiences.
Working 1,000 hours a year may well take a lot of the carefree fun from the university years. But we need to wake up and realise that there isn’t anything carefree about building up a huge student debt. If we don’t want to shorten degrees, better to lengthen them and make all degree courses part-time, enabling students to work more hours alongside their studies.
But if we decide to stick with three- and four-year undergraduate degrees, we should continue to set maintenance loans well below the level required to live on. And we should be upfront with our young adults about why this is. The last thing they need is to be offered more seemingly easy money from the government that translates into even more overwhelming, long-term debts.
Paul Wiltshire is the father of four UK university students.
