‘You’ve never had it so good” might be a catchphrase that sounds a little out of step with the present economic times, but that is the bullish message from the body charged with ensuring fair access to higher education.

David Barrett, assistant director of the Office for Fair Access (Offa), made his assessment following recent changes to state grant thresholds and revised bursary and scholarship packages offered by the universities to help students meet the £25,000-plus costs of getting a degree.

“It is a good time to go to university, particularly in terms of student support,” Barrett says in the wake of a 9% rise in applications this year. “There is a lot of support out there. The total package is more generous than we have seen for the past 15 to 20 years.”

This is good news as one of the knock-on effects of the economic downturn is that many parents will have less money to subsidise their children’s education as they try to juggle higher mortgage payments and household expenses in an increasingly less stable jobs market.

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Tuition fees will cost UK and European Union students a maximum of £3,225 in 2009, a rate levied by most universities outside Scotland across the board for the bulk of their undergraduate courses. On top of that, annual living costs are estimated to be £5,000 or more. That adds up to a bill of at least £25,000 for three years’ study.

The key to keeping debts down is to make sure you know what free cash you are entitled to and how to get it.

The new academic year this month heralded the introduction of higher income thresholds for maintenance grants, which means that two-thirds of students will be eligible for some form of financial assistance from the government, compared with just over half previously. From this month, new full-time students from England whose families earn up to £25,000 will be eligible for a full grant of £2,835 (£2,906 next year). The previous earnings limit was just under £18,000.

And the decision to raise the upper limit on earnings for qualification for any level of grant support from £38,331 to £60,005 brings a huge number of predominantly middle-class families within the scope of the grant system. Someone from a family with an income of £40,000 will this year get almost £1,000 a year towards their costs — compared to nothing previously — while a student whose parents’ income is at the upper limit will bank £50.

Universities are the other principal source of “free” cash — in the form of grants, bursaries or scholarships that don’t have to be repaid. But no two schemes are the same.

This year universities and higher education colleges in England are planning to spend more than £300m on bursary schemes and scholarships for students from families on low incomes — an average 24% of the extra income they get from higher tuition fees.

While universities charging the highest variable fees are obliged to pay a minimum bursary to those on full grants — currently £310 — the average is £800, while the highest contribution is £3,150 at Oxford and Cambridge.

Much of this bursary support has been pegged to the qualification thresholds for the state maintenance grant. Just one in five higher education institutions has opted to extend its threshold to meet the new upper limits set by the government. King’s College London is one of those that has — and even gone a little way beyond when determining who should get its maximum of £1,250 a year. All students from households with annual incomes of less than £28,810 will qualify.

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