Following a legal challenge by a student who has sued St Hugh’s College for discrimination against the poor, postgraduate students will no longer be required to provide financial evidence that they can cover the costs of living during the first year of their graduate programme.
Applicants to study for a postgraduate degree were previously obliged to show that they had the funds to cover £12,900 a year in living costs, in addition to the costs of tuition and college fees. Under the new ‘financial declaration’, students need only give their ‘assurance’ that they are ‘able and willing’ to meet their living costs throughout the duration of their course.
Earlier this year, 27-year-old Damien Shannon launched a legal challenge against St Hugh’s, where he was offered a place to study an MSc in Economic and Social History. In his legal papers, it was claimed that ‘the effect of the financial conditions of entry is to select students on the basis of wealth, and to exclude those not in possession of it.’
While St Hugh’s had initially intended to contest the case, the dispute with Shannon was settled out of court in March of this year. Shannon is scheduled to commence his course in October.
Although the financial declaration at Oxford has changed, the monetary barrier to pursuing postgraduate study still applies to a number of students.
While 41% of new graduates at Oxford last year had full or partial scholarship funding, many are still self-financed, both at Oxford and in the rest of the UK. A 2009 survey by the NUS of taught postgraduate students across the UK found that 66.9% of them were entirely self-funded.
Furthermore, Oxford students are encouraged to take on only minimal amounts of part-time work during the course of their degrees. The paid work guidelines for Oxford graduate students recommend that full-time graduates on taught courses ‘do not undertake more than 8 hours’ paid work each week while studying.’
A spokesperson for the University of Oxford told Cherwell, “The financial declaration aims to ensure that students are fully aware of the expected fees and living costs associated with their graduate study at Oxford, and is still intended to prevent students dropping out during their course, which is in the interest of both the welfare of individual students and of the institution.”
Eve Worth, a Brasenose postgraduate student who completed her Master’s degree this year, said, “The spirit of this change is undoubtedly positive, but I think it would be wrong to assume that this will significantly widen access.
“The problem remains that many students find it incredibly difficult to afford a Master’s programme and it is even harder than at other universities to take on part time work to finance study- both because the Master’s here are more intense (9 months instead of 12) and the university restricts the ability of students to undertake significant amounts of paid work.”
She added, “The fundamental problem remains that there is generally not enough funding for postgraduate students in the UK.”
