Tuition is already 80€ per month, and even that is waived if you come from a low-income family. But how is someone earning 600€/mo supposed to send someone to college when rooms cost at the very least 350-400€/mo? Plus living expenses, 150€ the bare minimum. Even if you apply for financial aid (which you will get) the amount is woefully inadequate to face this rising costs. The result is that poor families cannot send their kids to uni. That's not democracy, freedom, or equality.
Also those 225£, what fraction is that of the minimum/median household income?
Students are broke, but parents can help, and if your "room" costs half of one your parents wage, that help is less likely to happen. Or make the poorer even poorer.
That situation is totally different if your room costs a quarter of one of your parents wage.
Q: Do "minimum wage" rules apply 1) in theory, 2) in practice to postgraduate students?
Yet more [ancient] data: UK science research council funding for PhD students in the late 1990s was nothing to get excited about; I have an old bank statement here, BBSRC paid me the princely sum of £1377 on 1 July 1998, and by the way, that was for that quarter not for a month.
> Students are broke, but parents can help
Q: Do we really think postgraduate students should expect their parents to still be funding them?
If you have to find a part-time to pay some of your expenses yes. In that case a part-time in Lisbon will pay you slightly more than half of your room and in "your case" it would pay the whole room. It's a BIG difference if you have to go down that road.
> Yet more [ancient] data: UK science research council funding for PhD students in the late 1990s was nothing to get excited about; I have an old bank statement here, BBSRC paid me the princely sum of £1377 on 1 July 1998, and by the way, that was for that quarter not for a month.
I do agree that post-grads are very badly paid. But that's another issue.
> Q: Do we really think postgraduate students should expect their parents to still be funding them?
Not really, but if there's an emergency I think parents will not let their kids starve.
And this hackernews rhetoric of 'if I suffered everyone has to suffer as well' needs to end. That's not how you move forward.
Subject to ability to do so. I knew many grad students who took part time jobs to send money in the other direction. Their earning power was greater than their family's.
> £225 per month
Apparently, yes. We do expect parents to still be funding postgraduate students if they don’t want them to starve. £702 pounds per quarter seems kind of hard to live on. That’s like £8 a day to pay for everything except rent.
Actually, that seems kind of doable.
We were postgrad students. No idea about average wages for those who were working, but we were always broke.
16 years ago I paid £270/month to live in a sharehouse in Bristol (not generally as expensive a place to live in as Cambridge) in a boiler cupboard that had been converted to a bedroom.
Q: Are we talking about average students or average workers?
Data point: around 25 years ago, I was paying GBP225/month - so that's ~USD300 - for a (tiny!) bedroom in a shared house in Cambridge, UK.
I'm not sure what approach one would best use to adjust for 25 years of house price and/or general inflation, but isn't that in the same ballpark as your '$500' in Libson now?
FWIW, we thought housing was expensive back then, too.