Student Moans Loans

The old (before 2011) system of students loans is being replaced. This caused many students to complain and go on marches and generally make themselves look foolish and immature by acting without thinking. I may not be affected by the new changes but I was a student and so I’m going to give my opinions on the new system, but first I’ll give a brief outline of the old and new systems.

The old system, the one in place while I was doing my degree, had the tuition fees at £3,000 a year. So by the time I finished my Masters I had a debt of around £12,000 (not including the debt from maintenance loans). Repayment of this doesn’t commence until I’m earning over £15,000 a year, and then consists of 9% of what I earn over the £15,000 limit. Interest is added after the first repayment and tracks inflation.

The new system has seen the tuition fees rise to a maximum of £9,000 a year, which would have left me with a total debt of £36,000 (again, not including maintenance loans). Unlike the old system interest is constantly added to the loan. For the duration of your studies it is inflation+3%, it then drops back down to the base rate of inflation+0% when you finish, and then increases back up to inflation+3% when you earn between £21,000 and £41,000. You start paying back when you are earning above £21,000 this time, but like before you pay back 9% of everything above this limit. We can work out the faction of your wage you’d pay back each year under each system, y, as a function of how much you’re earning, x, using the following equations;

The plot of these can be seen in the graph below

 

It Begins.

I’ve decided to start my own blog in the vain hope that someone out there wants to listen to what I’ve got to say. A couple of my friends have blogs and one of them semi-regularly contributes to The Pod Delusion, a podcast about skeptical thinking. I submitted one piece for them about the new student loans scheme a while back but since then have struggled to find the time, however I’m hoping that with my own blog I’ll be less constrained by the topic of skeptical thinking (hopefully there will still be lots of that here though) and can post other things as well, specifically things like film, game and comic reviews, updates on my PhD and anything I think may be interesting. I also think it’ll take less prep and execution time to write a blog post than it did to write out and record my Pod Delusion piece.


I suppose the idea to get a blog really kicked off when I started my PhD. A friend of mine who I did my undergraduate degree with (the semi-regular Pod Delusion contributor) also managed to land a PhD position at Leicester and since we started in October we’ve been car sharing to and from work. It has now become a bit of a routine that we start every morning with a coffee and chat about the general problems of the world, before going off to solve two very specific and very diametrically opposed problems in physics (I’m a condensed matter theorist, he’s a theoretical astrophysicist). It is worth pointing that the two problems we are solving as part of our PhDs are the ones we are, hopefully, very informed on. More so as the PhDs progress. The problems we discuss over coffee almost universally involve subjects in which we have no official expertise, but have at least a general understanding, interest and have usually read about in other blogs or reports. We try to apply our own brand of problem solving and thinking to see if we can come up with a solution (regardless of whether one is needed or whether a better one already exists).


A number of the posts in this blog will hopefully revolve around some of those discussions, and by putting them on here we may get an outside opinion that we are missing (there’s always the worry that the two of us are becoming more and more extreme in our views, to the point where people may give us horrified looks when we explain our ideas, but hopefully that’s not the case), or just get the chance to discuss our ideas with others and have people who may know what they’re on about point out everything we’ve got wrong.