You’ve probably read, heard or seen the news about the increase in tuition fees.
Soon, universities will be able to charge up to £9,000 a year. Alongside this, the student loan payment system is being restructured. This morning on BBC breakfast, a number of accountancy firms modeled loan repayments based on three fictitious students. You can read the whole article here, but the following provides a brief summary.
£21,000: Amount above which graduates will have to begin paying back student loan.
30 years: Maximum amount of time you can spend trying to pay back loan. After this, the debt is cancelled.
£9,000: Maximum amount universities are able to charge for tuition fees.
2012: Year that Universities can begin charging up to £9,000.
£3,575 to £5,288: Range in value of maintenance loans available to students, depending on their family’s income.
3%: Amount of interest that may be charged on student loans. May be as low as the rate of inflation, but higher rates will be applied to higher earners.
£39,000: Amount a student would owe after borrowing £9,000 in fees and £4,000 for maintenance over a three-year course.
£83,791: Amount a student could end up paying in repayments if they repay the entire debt over 25 years.
Durham University: Latest Uni to announce they will be charging the maximum.
There are a lot of arguments floating around, both for and against the new tuition fees. Some say that the amount of debt students will accumulate is outrageous. Others, that the new method of repayment is a better system; spreading out repayments over a longer period could mean that monthly payments will be lower for many students. It’s all beginning to sound a bit like an advert for a slightly dodgy finance company. “Just consolidate all your debts with us, for a lower monthly repayment. Don’t worry about the fact that you’ll end up paying back more than twice what you owed in the first place. Just look into my eyes, not around the eyes, look into my eeeeyyyyyeeesss”. ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz I’m hypnotised. Next week we’ll have the Education Secretary trying to encourage us to send our grandma’s gold jewelry for cash value offsets on student loan repayments.
But seriously, I guess my point is, if you’re planning on going to uni, don’t sleep walk into it. Every decision we make has a cost. Saying yes to one opportunity means saying no to another. You just need to decide which opportunity represents the most value to you and think about what ‘value’ means. If it’s more money, think again.
Once upon a time, university was more about getting a holistic education and expanding your intellectual horizons. Now, we hear that “graduates could expect to earn £100,000 more over their lifetimes than those who had not been to university”. Are you sure about that? What if you end up paying £83,791 back over 25 years? Well then you’ve only made an extra £16,209. Still worth it? If I was 18 and wanted to get rich, I’d seriously consider forgetting about uni and start my own small business instead. I’d be playing around with a similar amount of debt and probably wouldn’t be taking a much bigger risk than spending £39,000 on a degree, then working as an unpaid intern, only to find out the graduate training scheme has evaporated.
Our society seems to want to use monetary measures to attribute value to everything. If it costs more, it must be worth more, right? So Cambridge, Oxford and Durham are bricking it because if they don’t charge £9,000 a year for tuition fees and some other uni that isn’t so ‘prestigious’ does, well, you can kiss goodbye to your hundreds of years of reputation, can’t you? Of course not, but if it’s not the most expensive it can’t be the best, or so we’re lead to believe.
Really think about why you are going to uni, because the wisdom of this world is starting to look pretty ropey. University was one of the best experiences of my life so far, but it hasn’t made me rich financially. However, if I think about the opportunities I had to share my faith, the people I saw come to know Jesus, the way my world view has matured and the friends I met, it was completely worth it. In my mind, value is found in people, purpose is discovered in making a difference that has eternal consequences. I wonder what Jesus would say about all of this. In Mark 8:34-37 he says "Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You're not in the driver's seat; I am. Don't run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I'll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self. What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for?” Sounds like a better way to me.
