Oxford future fees: Ouch

[vampire_kitten]

2012 FeesHousehold incomeTuition charge for first year of studyTuition charge for subsequent years£0 - £16,000£3,500£6,000£16,001 - £20,000£7,000£7,000£20,001 - £25,000£8,000£8,000£25,001 - £9,000£9,000
"In summary, Council has approved a sliding scale of tuition charges, from £3,500 to £9,000 a year, depending on household income, and payable

Comments

[anotherusedpage]

I am imagining a family in London. Earning 16,000 a year, which only just makes london basic rent, with really very little left over for food and travel. Paying £6,000 in fees. Leaves £10,000 to live on. For the household, including rent, plus oxford rent for the student. Assuming Magdalen rent from when we were there (and it's gone up since then), that'd be about another £3,000 a year, leaving the household income at £7,000, which absolutely definitely doesn't make London rent.

And I know that's not how it's supposed to work and you pay it back when you graduate and graduate earning potential la la la I'm just imagining how fucking terrifying it looks if you're trying to raise a family on that kind of money. It doesn't look like it's worth it.

[vampire_kitten]

My mother freaked out on how much I owed when the fees were a grand and my dad earned well over the highest band!

[footnotetoplato]

Yeah, I really hate the disconnect between how the system actually works and how it's likely to be perceived by the very people it's trying to attract.

In this case I would hope at least that the levels of the bursaries would be seen at the same time as the level of the fees. But I guess it won't always work like that.

[highfantastical]

...and of course, no account taken at all of factors affecting graduate earning potential.

So I would be owing £36,000 right now. Whilst not knowing if I will ever be able to work, let alone full-time. Would an English degree - even an English degree from Oxford; even a very good English degree from Oxford - be worth that? I don't even know.

And that no additional debt for living costs - which in reality I do have, only my parents could probably have paid that, instead of me having a loan, if they'd had to. But while we are not at all poor, they don't have £36,000 lying about to pay the fees. I can hardly imagine how rich you'd have to be to have that for each child, just...spare money.

It makes me so angry and miserable. :(

[vampire_kitten]

I'm £16k in student loans dept with no obvious likelihood of paying anywhere near interest in the forseeable future. And that was only paying £1k in fees a year with lowered rents!

[footnotetoplato]

But there's a *lot* of account taken of graduate earning potential! You never pay anything until you earn over £21,000 (in the vicinity of mean income), and then it's just a graduate tax on amounts over that £21,000, with the exception that if you pay enough you can eventually be exempt. But lots of people (about half) are expected not to have to pay it all before it gets cancelled after thirty years

[highfantastical]

But there's a *lot* of account taken of graduate earning potential!

Um, a system which completely ignores the impact of factors such as disability is not taking a lot of account of variations in earning potential.

[like_achilles]

This.

[footnotetoplato]

Note that one of the things they're doing with the extra income from the fees is substantially increasing the bursaries available for students from low-income families. This provides them with money up-front, which should[1] be rather more valuable than the same quantity in tuition fees, which they will pay back when they are richer, if at all. These are over £2000 a year for everyone who gets any kind of fee waiver, and on a sliding scale which gives money to people up to a household income of about £42,500 -- about £5,000 above the higher income tax threshold.

[1] Yeah, I know it won't always work like this, and some people will just look at the total figures. This makes me sad. I'm kind of pissed off at the way the whole system is being advertised.

[footnotetoplato]

Sorry, I just looked at the data more closely. The maintenance bursaries are already quite a bit more generous than I thought they were (basing it on how they were a few years back), and they're not increasing these by that much in real terms. But still, they are substantial (whether even more would be better -- I suspect it would), and don't seem to get as much mention as they deserve in this dialogue.