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[Postgrad loan] Penalised for being from a poorer background?

I've applied for a postgrad MSc course at the University of Birmingham and I've just learned that because I cannot afford the full course fee of £13,750 in one go, I am being penalised 1.25% by the university because I can only pay it in installments.

As the majority of the course fee is funded by SFE with the new postgrad loan (and the rest loaned from my parents), I find it astonishing that a university can penalise students for paying the course fees in installments when they have no other choice! Does anyone know if there is a way to ask student finance to pay the loan in one go?

Reply 1

Klix88

Up til last year, you would have been 'penalised' by not being able to do it at all. When I did my Masters, I was 'penalised' by having to work for 20+ years and save up the money to pay the fees with no state help at all.

It's time to be grateful for small mercies, whilst reflecting on the fact that you have more chance of changing your uni's rules than those of Student Finance. Your uni will catch up with the current funding changes in a year or two, so you need to decide whether that critical extra £178 is worth the gamble of deferring.

In my area, as a full-time student you'd be saving over £1000 in Council Tax exemptions over the course of a Masters year. Maybe you just need to look at the maths in a different way.

(edited 7 years ago)

Reply 2

Duncan2012

Plenty of places charge a premium for offering you what is, in effect, a credit facility. If you don't want to pay for that convenience then you'll have to work and save up, as Klix88 and myself and plenty of previous masters' students had to do. You are most certainly not being penalised so please stop with the self-entitled whinging.