The greatest scarecrow: Student Loans

Tereza Tomanová
May 17, 2018
3 min read

Hello everyone!

I'm bringing you another article, and on this one, we will focus more on financing. There is a lot of things you need to consider before you decide to study abroad, but this part is, I believe, one of the most important.

Things we need to make clear on the start is that study in the UK is paid. And yes, state universities are paid too, not only the private ones like in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Price for one university year is incredibly high. Fuu, I don't even want to tell you. Alright, here it is. It can go up to 9,250 GBP per year.

Pretty shocking, huh? Yes, I know. We've all been there. So now let's talk about the fact that most students can't afford to pay for it yet they are still studying. How?

There is one super duper thing called Student Loan. To be able to apply for a student loan you need to meet two conditions - to be EU student and to live on the EU land for more than five years. So basically, we all can apply for it.

Student Loan will cover all your student years, and you will start repaying it back after you officially lose your student status.But how I will be able to repay it just after the uni? I will be recent graduate with no job!

System thought about it too. You start repaying after you start earning above minimum limit - 21,000 GBP per year.If your income is not higher than the minimum, you don't need to pay anything.

If your income is higher than minimum - let's say 25,000 GBP per year, the system will calculate the difference between your earnings and minimum limit. In this case, 4,000 GBP. And from that difference, it then calculates 9% which are you repaying back to the British government. In this case 360 GBP per year / 30 GBP per month.

Yes, really. Only that amount. The student loan isn't there to ruin your life after study. Even though loans can be tricky and you need to be careful before you take some, this one is not. This one is cool.And I didn't even tell you the best thing about the loan. Its maturity is 30 years and after that, whatever you didn't repay is erased. Like deleted completely. Poof, it's gone.

One day student asked me, how it can be convenient for the UK when they will not get everything back? Well look at it from a different point of view - in the Czech Republic and Slovakia you are paying nothing for study and after you finish, you will not pay to that universities anything.

In the UK, you will give them at least something. That something you can afford. And they want you to be able to afford to repay it. They want you to be successful. It's not cliche this time, I mean it for real.

Also, you don't need to stay in the UK after your studies. Your loan is traveling with you, wherever you work. The minimum limit for repaying is then calculated by World Bank according to the economic situation of the particular country.

One last thing. We all know about Brexit. This little guy gives all of us, EU students, concerns. Every year since referendum (2016) British government makes adjudgment related to the next year students and their student loans. At the moment the system is secured for freshers 2018/2019, but not for anyone else after that.

Once they issue a statement about school year 2019/2020, I will write about it.