Peregrine wrote: Thinking about sacking off uni this year and going next year.
Basically, I didn't get the choice I wanted this year - got my fourth + fifth choices, and I've just worked out if I move to wales this summer, hustle for a year and apply to get in for 2013 fees could potentially be half of what they would be if I went this year (£48,000 vs £25,000).
On the other side I'm 22 and still haven't been to uni yet, getting out of the study grind might fuck up my motivation as it has in the past, could cause beef with the family, and there's no guarantee I could find a job when I move away.
What to do?
The £23,000 saving isn't real, the reason being unless you earn a load of cash you'll probably never pay off your loan… the way the whole thing is set up it's basically a graduate tax above £15,000 (or whatever it is now it's moved with inflation). As they've extended the loan period from 25 to 30 years the repayments aren't actually going to be very different from the older loans. The only people who'll really get stung by the loans are the graduates who are earing enough (i.e. doctors and lawyers etc.) that theirs get paid off over the course of the loan, wheras your average earner ends up paying only a fraction of their loan over it's course.
Either way the whole student loan situation isn't anything to worry about, the whole protest situation could have been avoided if the government had managed to communicate that we're not being hit by a crippling American-style student loan system, run by private companies who do their best to prevent you from consolidating your loans or moving to the income-based repayment scheme that Obama introduced.