IMO university in the U.K. feels expensive because (a) most people rarely have to directly pay for anything particularly expensive (house, wedding, maybe a car, not much else) so there is little grounding; (b) the British economy is in a poor state and no one has any money; (c) the ‘student loan’ phrasing is unhelpful; and (d) all the universities charge home students the same rate so none are really trying to justify their fees.
£9-10k a year sounds like a lot but it is eg not that far off the amortized cost of the various computer hardware I use for development at work. Similarly, the maintenance loans tend to be much lower than typical living costs for someone with a job but they were sufficient when I was a student. Maybe I was particularly fortunate as a student or I have a particularly expensive development environment at work.
I do think the dependence on foreign student fees is bad. Part of this is the government cutting funding massively and part is terrible management of the student visa system – universities should not have been allowed to be a backdoor way of paying for a U.K. visa as this hurt the legitimate use of the system.
When I was a student not so long ago but before the recent REF/funding/immigration changes, the international students (typically from the EU paying home fees, but also those from outside the EU paying full tuition) were clearly very able, often more so than home students. The most suspiciously moronic students seemed to be on de facto sports scholarships.
I just want to add here - I personally feel like an entire generation of people got absolutely betrayed by the government and put into unpayable debt just to go into university and no one really cared. If this happened in France, Paris would be on fire(well, more so than it usually is).
And what I mean by this - when I finished uni I had £12k debt, which I paid off after about 10 years of working, and it was on about 1% interest that entire time.
In contrast, my sister who finished university few years after me, has around £50k of student loan debt. And that loan is now on.....7% interest? It's insane. She is working full time and her payments are not even covering that interest, or barely cover it - she will never pay that loan off, it will eventually get written off. It's a constant 10% tax on all of her earnings, for 25 years(I think it's 30 now? or 35?) - except that this tax doesn't even go to the treasury.
It’s only like debt for the purposes of government budgeting. For a person, the ‘student loans’ are much more like a graduate tax which is weirdly regressive. The tax is only on monthly earnings above a certain level so lower earners pay a much lower effective rate than the marginal 9% rate. In particular, if you aren’t earning money you don’t pay, when you die your estate doesn’t pay anything, and if you go bankrupt the ‘debt’ is not written off.
£50k is a lot to your sister because of the sorry state of the British jobs market.
£9-10k a year sounds like a lot but it is eg not that far off the amortized cost of the various computer hardware I use for development at work. Similarly, the maintenance loans tend to be much lower than typical living costs for someone with a job but they were sufficient when I was a student. Maybe I was particularly fortunate as a student or I have a particularly expensive development environment at work.
I do think the dependence on foreign student fees is bad. Part of this is the government cutting funding massively and part is terrible management of the student visa system – universities should not have been allowed to be a backdoor way of paying for a U.K. visa as this hurt the legitimate use of the system.
When I was a student not so long ago but before the recent REF/funding/immigration changes, the international students (typically from the EU paying home fees, but also those from outside the EU paying full tuition) were clearly very able, often more so than home students. The most suspiciously moronic students seemed to be on de facto sports scholarships.