Best companies to sponsor an English Lit student at uni?

The companies that sponsor students are looking to support future employees. Universities and the civil service don’t do this as they’re part of the public sector.

Have you looked into how much student loan you’re likely to get and any additional bursaries from your universities

I'm getting bare minimum from my maintenance loan; we have an average household income, but I'm receiving no financial support from my parents on a point of principle. Of course, I fully understand this, but unfortunately, it is not taken into consideration by Student Finance or by any of my chosen universities as far as I'm aware. Any advice? I'm really stuck! Particularly as I'm applying to London universities, I'm fully aware of how extortionate the cost of living is, and it would be devastating if I was unable to apply to the courses I love purely for financial reasons.

If you’re only just applying (presumably for 2020 entry) then how do you know what your loan amount will be? Funding for 2020 doesn’t open until February/March 2020.

The best advice if your family are wealthy and unwilling to support you is either:
A) work for a few years and save up. If you work and support yourself financially for 36 months at the start of your course then SFE will class you as independent of your parents.
B) get married. SFE will then automatically class you as independent of your parents and grant you a loan based on your spouse’s income.

Usually companies only sponsor people who are already working for them to do degrees, typically as part of day/block release programmes (for example in healthcare roles) or via degree apprenticeship schemes. I would be extremely surprised if a company sponsored a school leaver, and it wasn't owned by the parents of said school leaver, to be perfectly honest. In such cases the company would be much more likely to make arrangements for a degree apprenticeship scheme, since then they get money from the government through the apprenticeship levy. Then they are getting a degree educated school leaver who will (hopefully) work for them afterwards, but they aren't footing the bill entirely.

Yeah I've heard that a lot, but my ex-boyfriend managed to secure funding from a major banking firm to study Maths at UCL without the clause that he would ever be employed by them. They do not foot the bill entirely of course, but as they believed he may potentially be an asset to the industry in future, they were happy to fund a portion of his expenses. He's completely without links to the company otherwise, no relatives with influence or anything like that. I just wanted to ask on the off-chance that any companies would consider doing so for an English student.