#Budget2015 – Why I’m feeling let down

[dropcap]U[/dropcap]niversity living just got a lot harder for many current and future students. The Tory Budget, released on the 8th of July, announced the end of Maintenance grants starting from the 2016-2017 academic year. Instead, students will have to take out repayable loans.

These plans only seem to increase debt and make it harder to survive as a young person, rather than encourage Higher Education. It certainly doesn’t seem like the government wants to facilitate young people’s access to university.

You may argue that the same fund of £8,200 is still available to the poorest students, so students won’t actually suffer as much as they are complaining that they will. However, as the amount they have to pay back in the future rises, the prospect of University seems less and less appealing.

The option of a paid apprenticeship seems more and more enticing when compared to getting into thousands of pounds of debt while struggling through a degree that might not be worth its cost.

Elsewhere in the Budget plan, young people get a similarly bad deal. There will be no automatic housing benefit for 18 to 21 year olds who are unemployed and claiming jobseeker’s allowance. A serious consequence could be an increase in youth homelessness.

my fear is that bright students would feel held back because of their backgrounds

Then, to kick us while we’re down, the increase of minimum wage to the living wage of £7.20 an hour doesn’t apply to under 25’s. So even what is good news to most people isn’t for the youth and especially those who are trying to support themselves and finance their education.

While phrases like “cutting the deficit” and “balancing the books” seemed like good things during the election campaign, we are now seeing the reality of how these measures will affect student lives.

Who knows how these planned changes will affect how we think about university? My fear is that bright students would feel held back because of their backgrounds, and instead search for other, less costly routes into employment.

I think nostalgically of a time when students were lucky enough to pay as little as £3,000 for fees per year, and are probably on their way to paying it off – something that seems impossibly distant to students nowadays.

Sadly, I can understand why scrapping Maintenance Grants makes sense to the Tory number crunchers, as a big chunk of money going out has now been taken off the books and will come back in as graduates start earning.

It’s easy, when concentrating on the large scale, to forget the individual students worrying about the prices of campus accommodation that are inflating, and the prospective debt that keeps on building. But surely, having a high number of educated graduates with manageable personal debt would benefit the economy in the long run?

Only the future can tell us the effects of these changes, but if I was a student who had voted Conservatives based on their policies, I’d be feeling pretty betrayed right now. Despite the catchy hashtag, #Budget2015 seems to be struggling to engage with the younger demographic.

Perhaps the Conservative government will succeed in their promise of “balancing the books,” but at what price?