If I were yo, I'd avoid student loans as much as possible.
Not possible (unless he has the odd £50k hanging around), and not necessary.
Student loans are provided by the government run Student Loans Company.
Tuition fees are the cost of your uni education and are capped at £9k a year for English students (Scots and Welsh get different caps and things since their governments pay the full fee or part of it).
The tuition fee doesn't have to be £9k. Mine is only £7.5k.
At the end of your average 3 year course you rank up a maximum of £27k in tuiuon fee debt.
You then get Maintenance Loans, which are to cover the cost of accommodation and living at uni.
These are then split in to Maintenance loan and Maintenance grant.
The loan you pay back as part of the student loan, but the grant is given to you without need to be paid back.
Grants are awarded by means testing, so students from worse off families get more of their Maintenance fee in grant form.
On top of this however individual universities offer scholarships and bursaries, which may or may not be means tested and give you money for free, if you meet criteria. Criteria might be good grades entering uni, doing specific courses with low uptake of students (stem courses), attending a university in the same region/county you live in, achieving good grades throughout uni, being a particular UK nationality, and more.
These take off a good chunk from your living expenses.
At the end of this you'll have rallied up some amount of debt.
This will be up to £27k in tuition and likely around £20k in maintenance fees, but this can vary greatly, depending on how much grant you get and where you study and the cost of living there.
So you can have about £50k odd in debt.
BUT, you only start to pay it off if you are earning over £21k a year. Anything under and you don't pay.
Anything over £21k and you pay a rate proportional to how much over you earn. So if you earn £50k a year you pay a larger amount than if you just earn £21k.
The loan has a fixed interest rate of 9% per annum. This 9% only applies to the amount you pay back based on your wage.
This is a low interest rate for a loan and it can't change.
Never ever take a bank loan out to pay off student loans, as the interest is much higher, can increase, and you have to pay regardless of how much you earn. Should circumstances no longer favour you and you aren't well off, such a bank loan could bankrupt you. A student loan cannot.
Finally, your student loan gets written off if you don't pay it off by the time you are 60, I think. Possi ly to the age of retirement.
Student Loans are not a bad thing at all. They're limited and capped in all places and you can decrease them through your circumstances.
You will never be bankrupted by them, and have forever to pay them off.
They're the best loan to have entering life as a young person, as you will likely have no other loans and bills, so you won't be adding another bill into an already burgeoning level of debt.
You are also getting them in order to go to university and get a degree. The entire point of this is to get an education and qualification in order to enter a good paying job, hopefully one over £21k.
The whole point of university is to eventually earn enough money to live well.
And if you go to uni and gather up all thisndebt and then never get a job where you start to pay it off, then either you make stuff job choices, or you chose a terrible degree.
