The last thing UK students need is a higher maintenance loan

Students already graduate with huge debts. Rather than accepting yet more easy credit, they should do more paid work, says Paul Wiltshire

五月 16, 2024
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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.

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Reader's comments (4)

And what of those students that do have courses that really are full time. You mention medicine and engineering. I'd add most STEM subjects. Our (biology) students have 10-12 hours of lectures a week, 6 hours of practicals, and 3 hours of analysis classes and 3 hours of transferable skills. In addition to that they have essays and lab reports to write, presentations to prepare, reading to do. In total, the university recommends 4 hours of personal study for every hour of lectures. In total the time adds up to almost exactly a full time job if divide across term time only, or 2/3rds of a full time job if spread across the whole year (1200 hours). Between all of STEM, medicine and engineering, this must add up to a large proportion of students. As for holidays, it's true that the summer is long. But it's only really oxbridge (and the few other places still operating 3 terms rather than 2 semesters) that still has long Christmas and Easter breaks.
It's clear that there are a vast range of differing time commitments involved dependent on what course you on. The point of my article though is to challenge the concept that the 'obvious' way to solve the maintenance loan issue was to simply get the students more into debt with a higher loan. The article does state that it is widely accepted that it is reasonable on most courses to be able to work up to 15 hours part-time during term time (this is stated by UCAS for example), so that alone is 750 hours paid work a year - so you only have to step this up in the long summer to get up to 1,000 hours. I appreciate that this could involve some weekend evening shifts such as say 4pm till 12pm on a Friday and/or Saturday, which isn't perhaps desirable for most students, but certainly it is do-able. So I do stand by that working 1000 hours isn't unreasonable for the large majority of courses. Paul Wiltshire
This is dreadful nonsense - assuming all students are fit healthy and aged between 18 to 22 with no dependants. There are many students with children, students who are caring for a health impaired parent or sibling, students who have significant mental health problems as well as students on 46 week a year courses where the placement commitment is considerable and the academic work is intense such as in nursing. Student poverty is deeply undermining of student success and really harms students ability to make more of their potential. Students should be able to borrow more - that doesn't mean that all will. Of course it is good for students to have the ability to earn money by part time work - but unless the loan ceiling is increased we will have many more students scarred by student poverty.
Of course, you could design a system where those not able to work 1000 hours a year could make an extra claim for an increased maintenance loan. But the essence of the article is that if students are freely allowed to borrow more, are we really helping them in the long term by lumbering them with debt that they have to pay back? We seem to have got into a position where we aren't factoring in the long term consequences of the reality of paying back the money that is borrowed as if it doesn't matter how much debt our young adults get into. Paul Wiltshire