Are we spoilt as students in this country? (Student Loans Co.)

Member Name: Pablo_Sevilla

Product:	Student Loans Co.
Date:	16/07/09 (91 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It makes us some of the most well-funded students in the world...

Disadvantages: Appalling helplines/customer service.

I am currently in the process of applying for financial help as I am starting univeristy in September this year as a mature student.

With this i'm moved to write a review about the Student Loans Company and the whole support system. So here it goes;

To explain what financial help is available to all UK students, there are 3 main types of help available:

Tuition Fee Loan - This is a loan that everyone is entitled too no matter how much money they or their parents earn. Most EU students also get this Loan. This loan simply goes straight to university each year to pay for your tuition fee. You don't see a penny of it and it goes to funding the university and it's facilities. At the moment the vast majority of univeristies are charging the full capped amount of about £3,500 a year.

Student Maintenance Loan - This is a LOAN that you get from the state to cover the cost of living expenses. You have to pay this back eventually (unless you earn under £15,000 a year after university, you don't have to pay any of the tuition fee or maintenance loan back until you start earning over £15,000 a year). Everyone is entitled upto 75% of the loan, the rest is dependent on other factors (like how much Maintenance Grant you are receiving). Most students get the 75% which is about £2,500 per year.

Student Maintenance Grant - This is a GRANT that you have to apply for. You do not have to pay it back as it's a grant not a loan. The amount of grant you recieve per year from the state depends on how much you or your parents earn and other more complicated reasons such as if you are married (they take your wife/husbands income) or have children (where you get different types of grants instead) or are disabled etc. You have to give proof of income and ask the state to financially assess you to be considered. If you or your parents earn less than £25,000 a year then you get the full £2,900 per year. £25,001-£60,000 works on a sliding scale. Anything over £60,000 and you will not get any grant at all.

Other grants include the disabled allowance, child support grant and a hardship fund (for those with a severe financial burden) and so forth. It's a rather unclear and highly complex system.

So let's be honest. We're probably some of the most well paid students in Europe if not the world. My girlfriend has come here to study from Germany and was shocked by just how much support we get as students in this country. They certainly do not get this kind of support on most of the European mainland and in many countries universities are so overcrowded that students have to sit on the floor during classes and seminars. In France there have been crippling student strikes earlier this year over financial help and staff pay.

Yet you still hear so much complaining. Why!? When we have it so good here?

We don't just have it good when it comes to financial support either; We have an absolutely incredible choice of degrees to study and can choose to apply for any university in the UK we want. In countries like Germany this is much more restricted and the choice of subjects to study are much more restricted depending on what subjects you took at the equivalent of A-level.

You only have to talk to an EU student to realise how good we have it here.

Maybe it's just because us Brits are a nation of complainers!

Yes, it's true we do leave university with a heavy debt to pay off to the state. Yes, tuition fees are high. But the fact is, the repayment of student loans is a fair system; You don't have to pay a penny back until you earn over £15,000 a year. And then you have the right to Hold Repayments for a period of upto 5 years no matter how much you are earning! My friend has just finished university and is complaining that he has to pay his student loan back each week in his paycheck as well as income tax, National Insurance and council tax...Well, he could quite easily just Hold Repayments if he was struggling that much!
As for high tuition fees, well I think it's money well spent; British degrees are very well respected across the world, we never have students having to sit on the floor due to overcrowding and generally speaking our universities are well equipped (Many universities even have their own nightclubs! Luxury!) and the choice of degrees on offer now is phenomenal (some would say ridiculous).

So how easy is it to apply for all these loans and grants?

Well, recently it's all possible and simpler to do it all online via the student direct website. You create an account that you can link to your UCAS account (the seperate account you use online to apply to univeristies and courses) where it transfers over a lot of your personal information saving a lot of time and hassle. Then the whole process is done online. You answer questions and fill in the forms and click on send. You will have to send income evidence in the form of P60's, bank statements etc to be income assessed for the student maintenance grant, but other than that it's all done online.
After completing the online application and sending off the financial evidence you will get a form a few weeks later through the post which you have to sign and send back to confirm and approve of all the loans/grants and the amounts they have assessed you for. Then that should be it. You get your payment schedule through the post nearer the start of term.

Now, it's a fairly efficient system if you get everything right in the application first time. I can't really knock it. It is confusing yes, but then I don't see any way they could make it simpler really so I can't really criticise them for this.

But what if you (or them) have made a mistake like me?

Ok, so it was 100% my fault. I was sick of filling in endless amounts of forms at the time (I was applying for a passport renewal as well as two insurance claims and so forth) so I rushed through the application for financial support and it turns out I made a major mistake by not applying to be assessed for a Student Maintenance Grant. Big problem because this was about 3 grand of free cash down the drain! Panic set in and so I rang student finance direct to ask them what the hell I could do.

I wont tell you the whole tedious and painfull story otherwise we'll be here all day!

The number is a very expensive 0845 number. It takes about 4 or 5 minutes of pressing numbers for various options until I am told by another robot/automated response that I now have to enter my 11-digit long customer reference number. Fine okay. Then I have to enter my pin number. Oh, what's that? I didn't get that in any email. Oh wait, the robot on the other end tells me it's simply "the first four digits of the day and month of your birthday. For example, 10-05 would be the tenth of May." Fine then. I press in the digits. I wait. I still wait..."The customer reference number and pin do not match, please try again". Okay, I try again, this time very carefully entering and triple checking each number. I wait. I still wait..."The customer reference number and pin do not match, please try again".

After much swearing and cussing into the phone and re-entering the same numbers on average 4 or 5 times you finally get told you will gert to speak to a human being asap.

Victory!! But no, wait. You are treated to around 10 minutes of the latest chart hits and put on hold with an intermittent automated message telling you every minute "The line is currently busy, it may be easier for you to visit our website. If you would still like to speak to one of our advisors, please hold the line."...More cussing from me ensues.

Finally, you get to speak to a human being, but by this time I am usually flciking through the paper infront of me or have fallen asleep and have forgotten what to ask! But of course, that doesn't really matter, because the advisors you speak to after 15 minutes of waiting ( 8 quid phone bil, where does our tax money go I wonder? Not on customer service helplines obviously) may as well be asleep! What an anti-climax after all that waiting!

The first two advisor I spoke to just seemed to want to get rid of me. He told me I should download a pff1 form from the website and fill that in and send it to the Student Loans Company in Darlington. This turned out to be a completely useless form that I may as well use as toilet paper to wipe my arse with.
The second advisor was a bit more talkative and friendly, though this guy, like the first, had a thick Scottish accent. I'm not quite sure why Student Finance England chose to situate there helpline in Scotland since they have a different loans system to England and no offence to the Scots but I find it hard to understand a thick Scottish accent sometimes just as they'd probably find it hard to understand a thick Cornish or Cockney accent.
But anyway, although this guy was a bit nicer, he told me to download another form that was again completely useless...More toilet roll then.
The third and final attempt was made this morning, and after a paticularly long wait and several helpings of Britney Spears I got to speak to someone without an indescernible accent and he turned out to be extremely patient and helpful. I'm pretty sure now that this is the right form (but I guess you never know with there helpline!).

So after spending 30 quid on a series of phone calls and wasting 5 hours of my life on bogus forms I finally have the form I need...Probably.

Fingers crossed I will get my maintenance grant by the start of term!

Overall I have to say I cannot really complain about how much financial assistance I will recieve. With my additional £1,000 bursary from the university I will be getting almost £10,000 per year to study.

The only problem is with the Student Finance England helpline which is quite frankly absolutely appalling on every level.

Still, £10,000 a year in financial assistance more than overrides this flaw for me. We have arguably the best university education system in the world and this costs money. I wouldn't want that to change for anything.

Summary: Amazing financial assitance, very poor customer service!