When university fees and funding are discussed, we inevitably tend to talk about the poorest – the poorest students, the poorest families, and sometimes those who don’t earn a significant premium and so become the poorest graduates.
New proposals from the Sutton Trust, for example, note that since the abolition of maintenance grants in England, students from lower income backgrounds have been leaving university with the highest levels of debt.
New (or at least tweaked) analysis by London Economics for the Sutton Trust estimates that poorer students could graduate with £60,100 of debt – 38 per cent higher than the £43,600 for those from wealthier families, with the gap largely driven by the need to take out maintenance loans.
It says essential costs are higher than the maximum available loan for almost 6 in 10 students, 1 in 5 students’ housing costs alone are higher than the available loan, a third of students from working class families have skipped meals to save on food costs, and almost a quarter of students report they have missed a course deadline because of their job.
