Bad parents make their 18-year-olds take out student loans. Good parents pay the tuition fees (up to £9,000 a year), plus living costs (a minimum of £5,000 a year). Or at least that's how it seems.
The Coalition keeps saying that the new student loans are 'progressive'. But it hasn't filtered through to the rest of us yet. It seems instead that there's a huge yawning gap opening up between the lucky ones (whose parents can pay) and the remaining 75% (whose parents can't).
I am a bad parent. I am a bad parent who feels guilty when someone says, 'Well, we got it all for free, so why should our children be saddled with debt?' My heart contracts with misery. I don't want my children saddled with debt.
But I just haven't got the money to give them. No one told me when my three children were born in the 1990s that it was going to cost £42,000 to put a student through university. How do I lay my hands on that kind of money?
It's the suddenness that gets me. It's a bit like staggering into a maternity unit, 5cm dilated, and the midwife says, 'I'm so sorry, but we've just decided to start charging, so that'll be a million pounds or you'll have to have your baby in the car park.'
But you don't have to lay your hands on thousands of pounds, says the Coalition. No one has to pay up front. Get the education first, and pay later. But there we are again, back where we started - our children saddled with debt.
Parents are knitted into the cost of university education in a way that I have never quite understood. All these new reforms are billed as a way of making sure that graduates (who get better jobs) contribute to the cost of degrees. That's a reasonable argument. But the size of the debt these graduates build up is based on the earnings of the people who brought them up.
The vast majority of students are over 18 - so young independent adults. But their entitlement to grants, bursaries and loans is based on their parents' household income. You will end up, as a student, having to borrow more if your dad is a teacher than if your dad is a cleaner. How does that make sense? How can you deliberately design an education system that ties young people to the financial success, or otherwise, of their parents?
Years ago, back in the Dark Ages, when tuition fees were paid by the local education authority and maintenance grants (living expenses) were means-tested (so dependent on how much your parents earned), I was at university with a girl who started living with her boyfriend. When her parents found out, they cut off her maintenance allowance (they didn't like the boyfriend). She worked every night in a bar, but still couldn't afford to eat properly. She used to faint in lectures. I tell this story just to make the point that even parents who can afford to don't necessarily shower their student offspring with vast amounts of cash. And I don't like the assumption that they will.
Even if we accept the way the system has been set up - which is presumably because no one likes the thought of a call centre worker paying tax to put little Florence Cameron through university - we are treading very gingerly into a new world of guilt and anxiety.
Graduates don't, as we keep being told by guilty Lib Dems who broke their election pledges, pay anything back until they're earning £21,000. Even then it's only 9% of what they earn over that amount. You could argue that paying back that kind of money isn't the end of the world, especially when graduates are young and single.
But once my children have got kids of their own - once they're paying rail fares to commute, and a mortgage, and hefty fuel bills, and income tax, and national insurance, and more and more money just to eat - losing even a tiny percentage of a very stretched income is going to seem impossible. As a grandmother, I'm going to be looking at my kids struggling to make ends meet, and how am I going to feel? Guilty. I'm a bad parent. I should have found the money, all those years ago, to pay the fees.
So what can you at this very late stage do if you don't want your 18-year-old to start her first ever grown-up job with a debt of over £40,000? Maybe it's time for drastic measures. If you're lucky enough to own property, you could sell up, pay off the mortgage, hope there's a bit of equity left, and pitch a tent in a friend's garden. You could turn back the clock 18 years and pay your child benefit into an ISA. You could take out a loan yourself. You could emigrate. You could persuade your bright-eyed school leaver that she doesn't want to go to university anyway because it's a waste of time and she ought to get a job (if she can find one, which is looking less and less likely), even though that would be a bit of a lie, as most employers seem to demand degrees these days.
None of those options fill me with joy.
There's a tiny crumb of comfort left. It's not too late to start saving for a deposit on a one-bedroomed flat so that, in 15 years' time, your debt-ridden 33-year-old can finally - possibly - afford to leave home.
But don't hold your breath.
Are you anxious about how students/their families will afford university?
What are you planning to do?
Does not paying for your children make you a 'bad parent'?
Or is it 'good' to let them stand on their own two feet?
Tell us what you think...