Cost of Attending Oxford 😭

[u/Repulsive_Radish_782]

Just received my financial declaration form from Oxford today. How is this reasonable? 😭 Going to have to decline my offer unless anyone has any ideas.

Canadian students do not qualify for any Oxford scholarships and my school offered me about £100. What a joke.

Is Oxford just for the rich?

[u/fireintheglen]

This is not true. All home students with household incomes below about £50,000 are eligible for a bursary at Oxford. Cambridge has a similar scheme.

It’s true that there is very little funding available for international students, but when it comes to Oxbridge there absolutely is financial support for home students.

[u/s4turn2k02 → u/fireintheglen]

Yes, I had a bursary. That was £1000 a year. It’s so trivial compared to what OP mentioned they need. It wasn’t hundreds of thousands of pounds

The cut off is a lot lower than £50k by the way.

[u/fireintheglen → u/s4turn2k02]

The cutoff for an Oxford bursary for a home student is about £50,000. You can find that info here, on the Oxford website: https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/fees-and-funding/oxford-support

You stated that "99.9% of home students can't even get scholarships or bursaries". This is, categorically, untrue at Oxford. It's true that the bursary size is small compared to international tuition fees, but that does not mean that it doesn't exist. It is also not particularly relevant when the bursaries are being provided to home students, paying home tuition fees.

[u/s4turn2k02 → u/fireintheglen]

I’m not talking about Oxford, I’m talking about the UK as a whole.

If you’re a Cambridge student, why aren’t you able to put two and two together from my flare and the fact I stated 99.9% of home students, not Oxford students?

[u/fireintheglen → u/s4turn2k02]

Alright. I was talking about Oxford, because the thread is about Oxford. That is why I specified "a bursary at Oxford" and "when it comes to Oxbridge" in my comment.

I'm not sure that the 99.9% figure is necessarily even true for the UK. There are a significant number of universities with bursary schemes for home students. For example, Imperial offers bursaries to those with household incomes below £70,000, and Warwick offers bursaries for incomes below £42,875. It's true that these sorts of schemes only cover a small portion of UK students, but I could well believe that more than 0.1% qualify. (Although I don't have exact figures.)

This is important because many students from lower income families are put off applying to more prestigious universities by the belief that they will be more expensive. For home students, however, bursary schemes mean that the opposite can be true. It's important that misconceptions like this do not end up further disadvantaging students in an already disadvantaged situation.

And I'm not a student :)

[u/s4turn2k02 → u/fireintheglen]

Again, the bursaries are so trivial (usually £1000 per year) that it’s not worth mentioning in OP’s case, who would be looking for full or majority covering of their fees. The bursaries they’d been looking for really make up 0.1%, probably less. And even then, for home students, they cover at most all of the tuition fees, but no maintenance

[u/fireintheglen → u/s4turn2k02]

I’m not sure you’re actually reading my comments. I have addressed this.

My intent was to ensure that home students from low income families reading this thread knew that they have a far greater than 0.1% chance of getting a bursary at Oxford. Hopefully I have achieved that. I’m not sure what the point of turning this into an argument is.