What can possibly go wrong?

I have long said that student loans and grants should be scrapped, and that students should be entitled to the same Citizen's Income as anybody else in that age group (which I'd set for sake of argument at the same rate as JSA or Income Support for people aged under 25, i.e. £51 a week). This would be flat-rate and non-means tested (unlike student grants!), and of course non-contributory and non-taxable (and be an alternative to claiming a much higher tax-free personal allowance, everybody chooses for themself).

(Tuition fees are a different topic - ideally, taxpayer funding of universities would stop, and they'd just charge whatever the market will bear, if students are supposed to be the brightest and best, surely they can work out whether their higher future income will be enough to cover the repayments of the loan they take out to pay the fees? Or they can work while they're studying, or work first and save up (I've got two degrees, and I've done both). But I digress.)

As to the basic grant, i.e. Citizen's Income, seriously, what can go wrong? Until you're 16, Child Benefit gets paid to your parents. If you leave home or get a job you can ask for it to be paid to yourself, when you turn 18 they give you a choice of Citizen's Income of £51 a week (if you're unemployed, studying or in a low paid job) or a tax-free personal allowance of £7,500 (if you're in a better paid job) or whatever the CI rate divided by the flat tax rate happens to be, and so on.

Does anybody imagine it would be a colossal f*** up like this?