Varsity Blues

This report seems to demonstrate a confusing division in the way that students are portrayed. Proposition 1: Students now have more disposable income; Proposition 2: This income is provided chiefly by credit services; Proposition 3: Students are therefore better off than ever before. I think this makes sense; the government is providing an almost unrealistically good loan, on which you pay virtually no interest, and for which you are not responsible until you are earning a significant salary. Although the repayments, when they become necessary, are quite high (all-told, amounting to a 40% tax rate while on the lower échelons of the income ladder), it is still a dream loan. I couldn't comment on what the loan provides personally, because I don't have one. But it is obvious that the student loan by itself is nowhere near enough to live on.

The maximum annual loan, now set at around £4000, works out at £330 per month, if spread over a twelve-month period (though it is issued termly). This income is intended to cover the costs of accommodation and the costs of living. By my calculations, the cost of accommodation in Manchester is between £200 and £250, that in a growing letting market due to ever-increasing demand. That leaves between £80 and £130 per month to spend on living costs, amounting to between £18 and £35 per week.

As the report rightly states though, the spending habits of us students far exceeds those very modest income levels. Almost everyone I know either works between 16 and 24 hours per week in addition to their course commitments, or have huge overdrafts and/or credit card debts, or they receive money from parents and relatives, or any combination of the above. In most cases, I would suggest that the two most substantial categories are from credit facilities and part-time jobs. The job I have just started, if I work 16 hours per week, will provide me with an extra £300 per month, which, if I had a loan, would double my income instantly.

In my experience the chief problem that students face financially is how to pay their fees. There is a bizarre system in Britain whereby a student's ability to pay fees is based upon his parents' income, but there is no obligation for parents then to be responsible for paying them. In Germany, I learn, parents receive child benefit until their child is age 27, if staying on in full-time higher education. Now this option is costly, and it is perhaps unsurprising that Germany's economy is stagnant. Many students, and it is usually the ones with poorer families, end up trying to pay their £1100 fees out of their student loan, which clearly, after rent, then leaves them with no money left at all - and that's before they've even spent any. The only option, it seems to me, is for students to be issued with significantly larger loans, and for the payment of fees to be deferred until after graduation. Means-testing of parents should be abolished not because it is wrong, but because at the moment it is totally ineffective. There should be no resulting inequality - students who graduate from university all have the qualification which has resulted from how well they have worked at university, and so their payments back should reflect that, rather than their family background which, by graduation, may well be quite irrelevent.

University costs are higher today than ever before because there are exponentially higher numbers of undergraduates each year. Either we artificially cut back the number of people allowed to go to university, which is regressive and will ultimately be to the detriment of the economy, or we recognise that this is the way it is, and find a system of finance which gets the most out of students through their university work, rather than being compromised by constant overextension in part-time work.

However, one things that we can categorically say is, I think, that universities are no longer the stronghold of the middle classes as protrayed in the Young Ones, where I always felt that living in poverty was more a kind of identity choice than a reflection of the necessities of reality. Yes, students spend more money now than they did before - but they are, ultimately, now responsible for that money and for its repayment.