Career prospects help

If your ultimate goal is to start your own business, then you need to choose the one which will take you there. A career - working for someone else - is just a short-term goal. From what you've said, career prospects should take second place to getting the qualification which will best set you up to start your own company.

This isn't very convincing to me to be honest. At the end of the day, if you're starting your own business, then the qualifications you have are irrelevant. The qualification is to demonstrate to potential employers that you have a certain aptitude, but if you're your own employer then you're demonstrating your own aptitude to yourself? It's silly. At the end of the day, a qualification isn't going to take you to 'start your own business', your passion, confidence, and determination will.

OP, if you are dead set on starting your own business, have done your research, know what you are doing and have confidence in that, then your money is probably better spent injecting into your own start-up. You can easily study more in the future should you desire to, and you'll certainly have more disposable income to do so with from your business.

In the case of the Imperial course, it's not about getting a qualification, but about the course content which will give a grounding in management theory and entrepreneurship - vital for anyone wishing to start their own business.

The King's course would also give skills, but would be more focussed on a specific type of industry job rather than going it alone.

Getting a degree needn't necessarily be a box-ticking exercise to get a qualification which impresses a future employer (although I grant you that many are). Sometimes they're actually about learning things.

Sorry but I never said that degrees were merely a box ticking exercise, let alone implied there is no learning involved, or life skills to be gained. Why would I be studying otherwise?

In the grand scheme of things, however, a degree will do little to help you start your own business. The fact that a very significant proportion of entrepreneurs start their own highly successful businesses without even completing their undergraduate courses attests to that. It is important not to erroneously prioritize things when it comes to time and investment.

The OP needs hard, practical experience if they're to achieve their desires, not inapplicable theory which they spend £21,000 doing on fees alone..