Zero kroner. That’s exactly how much EU students pay for masters study at the University of Copenhagen. It’s not been the best start to 2026 for Denmark, but at least young people there know that should they so wish, they won’t face financial barriers to being able to study this complicated world we live in.
Back at Oxford, a lot of attention is paid, and rightly so, to the University’s access efforts at undergraduate level. It’s now a year since the new access and participation plan for undergraduates was released. Focus has shifted to ensuring that the most disadvantaged students feel that Oxford is a place for them. Bursaries and loans mean that for most, study is not a financial impossibility. The graduate access situation, by contrast, is quite simply disastrous. Programmes like UNIQPlus and Academic Futures, while welcome, do not even scratch the surface of the problem, where elite universities have effectively become pay-to-play for certain courses.
There are infamous examples, such as the Master of Public Policy (MPP), which will set you back £54,450. That’s well over the UK average disposable household income for a year, whichever way you cut it. Many students might receive scholarships in this case, but how many students didn’t even apply or couldn’t take up their offer because of this colossal price tag?
In a way, these outliers distract from the ubiquity of the problem. For home students, an MSt in English is nearly £18,000, an MSc in Social Data Science over £28,000, and you’ll need to find £29,000 a year for the MPhil in Development Studies. The government’s postgraduate loan, by contrast, is a single payment just shy of £13,000.
The University proudly states it intends to offer “over 1,100 full or partial graduate scholarships” for 2026/27 entry. Putting aside the ambiguity of that statement and the fact even funding half of 50 grand isn’t going to do it for the ordinary person, it should be noted that there are around 6,000 postgraduate places each year. Something tells me that Magwitch-style benefactors aren’t secretly coming in and paying the fees of the remaining 5,000 students or more.
What’s particularly misleading is the packaging of this issue as an EDI problem. It is undoubtedly true that so much more needs to be done to help the most disadvantaged to access Oxford. But really, anyone but the most advantaged would need help to afford these fees. This is not just a problem of the very poorest in our society being priced out of postgraduate study at Britain’s top institutions. This is ordinary people, middle class people, even statistically quite well-off people, who simply cannot pay such astronomical prices for their learning. This isn’t about ‘inspiring’ people to try postgraduate study, complete with punchy corporate branding. This is the cold logic of market capitalism: the sums simply don’t add up.
I suppose all this wouldn’t be such a glaring problem if there was a systematic programme of scholarships for home students. But if anything, the opposite seems to be true. Funding is awarded on the basis of merit, not need, and very little of it goes to British students. Of the 91 named scholarship programmes managed by the central University (or available on its website at least), British nationals are ineligible for most, while a great many are reserved for students who are ordinarily resident in countries other than the UK, such as China.
That means we can’t assume from the fact that over 48% of students get some kind of funding (and even then not necessarily full funding) that this goes to the most in need. SU research from 2024 showed that 83% of international scholarship-holders are from the two most privileged socioeconomic groups, with 53% is the equivalent figure for home students. As many as 70% of low-income offer holders for some courses are not able to enrol because they simply cannot afford the fees.
This is not a question of students feeling like they don’t fit in, or even struggling to make ends meet during term. This is a cut-and-dry case of gross income inequality. Students have been sounding the alarm about this for years, and nothing’s profoundly changed. Perhaps a wake-up call could be the strategic damage this is doing to the UK. In countries like France, students have the opportunity to study integrated masters across all disciplines, and pay fees of at most a few thousands euros for top institutions like Sciences Po, and often much less. It’s often cheaper for British students to study as internationals at elite continental universities than it is to study at Oxford, Cambridge, or LSE.
The result of British graduates besides the very rich being locked out of elite postgraduate study is a less qualified generation, less competitive in the international job market, where a master’s degree is increasingly seen as the norm. The official line at the United Nations, for example, is that a master’s degree is not necessary, but you’d be very lucky to get a role without one.
Fewer British postgrads also means less talent likely to stay in the UK, contributing to home-grown capacity in research, development, and the third sector. Indeed, many of the scholarships I’ve seen are conditional on recipients returning to their home country after their time at Oxford.
Oxford thrives by accepting students from all around the world: that shouldn’t change. But British students have to be supported to complete postgraduate study at our nation’s top universities. To continue to ignore this crisis is to make a mockery of undergraduate access too; postgraduate study becomes a big asterisk in the corner of Oxford’s access mission.
As it stands, ordinary people are priced out of elite universities overnight. Only systemic change to postgraduate study can rescue Oxford’s status as the true home of the best and the brightest.
