I've been offered admission, but I can't afford it.

OKay, you obviously don't get it

she's black...

You can still be Racist...even if you're married to someone of a different race.

All home students are subsidized to the extent and in the sense that the government fronts up the money and says you can pay it back when you can afford to.

Beyond this only STEM students receive a subsidy, and actually only some of them*. I can still do a one year (that is 12 month) taught Masters degree in the Arts or Social Sciences for £6000, receiving as much teaching time as the undergrads in the same department, and this often in small groups and never in huge lectures, and having supervision and marking for a longish dissertation on top of that. On an undergraduate Arts or Social Sciences course having a big intake the per head costs, and certainly in the first year, might be as low as £3000.

This is little understood by the STEM snobs on here. That the Arts and Social Sciences students are subsidizing them and not the other way about.


*Not maths and stats and possibly not computer science or architecture. You really need labs to drive provision costs to £9000 per head even on a big intake.

I'm an International student from India, and I've been offered admission to a 4 year course in Biochemistry at University College, Oxford. Now I really really want to go, because my country has very limited opportunities for research, but my full four year fees comes up to about 170000 GBP (everything included), which is WAY more than I can possibly afford. Is there any sort of financial assistance available to me? I know there are the Reach and Simon and June Li scholarships, but those are very limited in number. Can anyone help me?

All home students are subsidized to the extent and in the sense that the government fronts up the money and says you can pay it back when you can afford to.

Beyond this only STEM students receive a subsidy, and actually only some of them*. I can still do a one year (that is 12 month) taught Masters degree in the Arts or Social Sciences for £6000, receiving as much teaching time as the undergrads in the same department, and this often in small groups and never in huge lectures, and having supervision and marking for a longish dissertation on top of that. On an undergraduate Arts or Social Sciences course having a big intake the per head costs, and certainly in the first year, might be as low as £3000.

This is little understood by the STEM snobs on here. That the Arts and Social Sciences students are subsidizing them and not the other way about.


*Not maths and stats and possibly not computer science or architecture. You really need labs to drive provision costs to £9000 per head even on a big intake.

...don't STEM students end up subsidising social science/ arts students far more because they tend to get much better paid jobs and pay far more in taxes?

There is a really useful website called The Scholarship Hub, they have all sorts of scholarships including international ones.

You could also look into getting a sponsorship, large companies may fund your degree if you agree to work for them afterwards. (I have a relative who did this and has been funded from the start of their bachelor's degree all the way through to their doctorate.)

I'm not really sure what else there is out there that hasn't already been suggested but good luck.

As far as I can tell, your only option if you are indeed desperate to study there for undergraduate is to simply get your foot in the door. That is, rather than tackling the impossible cost of four years, focus on one year. Can your family loan the first year's fees in instalments? Could you defer your offer and save up the fees yourself during a gap year? If so, you could then get a part-time job in Oxford (as well as apply for hardship funds from your college) and attempt to scrape through the first year. Who knows, if you do well perhaps Oxford will pull some strings. If not (and more realistically) you have still benefited from a year at Oxford (which can be listed on your CV) before finishing up in India, and returning to do your MSc/PhD at Oxford on an international studentship.

As I said, that's if you're determined to study there. Oxford is, I think, worth extreme measures if research is your chosen career, despite its being fashionable on here as of late to relegate its superiority.

You can still be Racist...even if you're married to someone of a different race.

I mention no particular ways for Oxford to enrich itself because that was not essentially relevant to my argument. But others might suggest (though I do not endorse all of these means): privatising itself (Prof. Laurence Brockliss, fellow of Magd and author of the latest official history of the university, did suggest this recently); merging the college endowments; soliciting money from alumni more aggressively; run more for-profit master's or certificate programmes; promise free passes to children of big donors; adopt a US-style fee regime whereby fees are ludicrously high but need only be paid in full by the rich with others being offered financial aid based on their needs; open for-profit campuses in, say, Bahrain or Beijing; sell some old, pretty, expensive buildings and move to new, ugly, cheap ones.

God, keep the kohinoor DAMMIT, but at least subsidise education for us indians as a past commonwealth country. We just want to learn our subject............

Oxford has the highest portion of privately-educated students (they are 7% of the country)

this isn't right and is a red-herring statistic often bandied about. 7% of school children in the UK are being privately educated. But Oxford, like any other university, doesn't recruit from the pool that is schoolchildren in the UK but rather recruits 17-18 year olds in education in the UK, and just over 20% of these are in the independent sector.

That difference in figures exists because (i) working class kids are much more likely to drop out of education at 16 than are kids being privately educated, such that the relative percentage would rise even if there were no other change, and (ii) for the aspirant lower middle class, 2 years of private 6th form might be the whole of the push that the family budget can run to, "now's the time to make sacrifices for Tim's future", so the transitioning works in that direction and at that stage.

Something else that's true, and bears on this discussion, is that GCSEs allow for sorting and scholarships. You'll see on TSR a lot of "chance me for Westminster VIth form" threads, where students anticipating 10 A*s or something similarly preposterous are wanting to switch into the independent sector at that stage. This is important because students with 10 A*s are are as well the ones most likely to later interest Oxford.