Hilarie Stelfox condemns proposed rises in top up fees for university students

Mar 21 2009 by Hilarie Stelfox, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

THE BOY has been on the phone asking for money.

He’s a student, so this state of affairs is not entirely unexpected.

In fact, our bank account has been bleeding in his direction since October last year and we face a good few years of financial drainage.

He’s currently sorting out where he will live next year and needs a deposit for a student house. It doesn’t seem five minutes since I was asking for their help in assessing how much to give The Boy while he was living in a hall of residence.

Having his own house will, of course, prove more costly as there will be the not-so-small matter of electricity, gas and water bills. The latter might come as something of a shock. My friend’s daughter rang her parents to ask why the water authority had sent her a bill.

“She’d never thought about it before,’’ said her mum, who was exceedingly amused that someone predicted a 2:1 in a hard science, was so endearingly naive.

The news this week that the Government is considering raising university top-up fees is, therefore, about as welcome as a nest of spiders to an arachnophobe and just about as scary.

At the moment The Boy is borrowing £3,145 a year to pay towards his education. At the end of his four year course he’ll owe more than £12,600. Fortunately for him we’ve agreed to cover everything else for as long as we can.

If fees are doubled we’ll have students leaving university owing as much as £25,000 for fees alone, never mind the rest.

And, of course, it is the middle and lower income families who will suffer.

Amazingly, it would seem that no-one in power is prepared to do anything about it. And, strangely, the students themselves don’t seem as upset as you might think.

When I told The Boy that he might have to take out a further student loan if his sister goes to university he said it would be “no problem at all. I’ll just borrow it, like everyone else.’’

His friends of lesser means are merrily spending money and running up a debt that will only be paid if they are fortunate enough to find a job in the recession that will surely dog the next decade.

Not wishing to alarm anyone with a child who has university ambitions, but I’ve worked it out that Firstborn’s higher education will have cost us and him a total of nearly £30,000 by the time he graduates. Increased top-up fees would make that more like £45,000.

Of course further education is expensive, but it should not be prohibitive. Perhaps some degree courses could be shortened so that students can fast-track. The Boy is positively scathing about first year arts undergraduates who spend their mornings lying in bed. All vocational degrees in fields where there is a demand for graduates should be state funded regardless of a student’s background. This already happens in some professional areas and extending it would channel more young people into ‘useful’ study.

But the answer to the problem of funding is certainly not to bankrupt the nation’s youth before they’ve even found a job.