While looking for grad schools I’ve been told many times to never go to one not willing to “pay you” to go there, generally meaning waiving your tuition and giving you a small stipend to live on (via employment as a teaching or research assistant). This seems to be very common in the US, but I’m interested in trying to study abroad if I can. I tried Japan, which doesn’t seem to do it except through a specific government funded scholarship, but I didn’t get my scholarship, so that’s out.
I’m curious about other countries now, especially the UK. Is it common in the UK for postgraduate (masters and PhD) students to get their tuition waived? I was looking at the University of Nottingham, for instance, but I can’t seem to tell. For international students they have a page on scholarships, and a bunch of talk about when tuition is due, but I can’t tell offhand if you’re “supposed to” get a TA/RAship that waives tuition and such. I ask because while I’m interested in abroad, I can’t really afford it if they generally don’t do such a thing.
I’m not necessarily talking about Oxbridge, as I understand they’re different sometimes, just in general (though I do technically meet the admission requirements for Cambridge).
The general process for the UK, I take it, is to get a scholarship of some sort, of which there are many sorts. The scholarship will pay for school fees and living expenses, and won’t including teaching (but you may also be able to get teaching and get paid for that, as a separate issue). When you apply, you might be able to tick a box saying “I want to apply for such and so scholarship” for some scholarships; but others you will need to apply for separately. And you might need to put in a fair amount of work to figure out what you can apply for. Also some scholarships are going to be tied to a project, others not.
It depends on whether you’re talking PhD or MA - but since the 'you should not go there if they’re not going to fund you thing is more commonly heard in relationship to PhDs, I’ll assume that’s what you’re headed towards. In much of Europe (but probably less so in the UK - only noticed you’re particular interest in that country on rereading the OP), PhDs are not students, but as junior research employees - which means they get a contract, they’re formally hired, they get a bunch of benefits - and pay no tuition fees or any other fees students pay It also means (from what I’ve seen) that they tend to occupy a different position socially, in that they’re part of faculty as opposed to another student.
Here in Oz you will normally not be charged tuition fees, and will often get a scholarship to live on. If you are an Australian citizen. Like most countries we also make money on full fee paying students from abroad. That is a different matter.
Fees for Oz citizens are not full fees - they are a partial fee - the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS - pronounced “hex”). Undergraduate students all pay HECS, either up front, or they carry it as a debt payable as a surcharge on top of their income tax once employed. Universities are given a set of HECS exemption scholarships by the government, that they can allocate out. Typically there are enough of these to cover all full time PhD students, and often part time PhD, or even Masters by thesis students. So a reasonable expectation is that a PhD will not incur any fees.
There are typically a number of scholarship schemes, federally funded, university funded, and research grants will typically include funding for a couple of PhD student scholarships. The federal scholarships tend to be very competitive, and and unless you are a top ranked student, you won’t get one. Joining a research programme that has some scholarships is common. Universities often provide more as well. Most students will end up with some form of living scholarship, although there can be a wide variation of the level. A top level scholarship can allow a student to live pretty well by student standards.
The latter kind of scholarship seemed much more common the last time I was applying.
That is, a research proposal is of particular interest to a company. So they sponsor the PhD paying both tuition fees and a decent living allowance (obviously not as good as simply working full-time, but enough to live on).
The application process is split across the University and the company.
Sometimes part of the deal is that you agree to work for the company for X years after you graduate, but I don’t see how they could enforce that.
I’ve also seen it from the other side; working for companies that decided to sponsor a PhD as a way of doing some research on the cheap
OTOH This kind of thing is either rare, or doesn’t exist for Master’s degrees.
It’s most common in STEM fields. And yes, I’m planning on working towards a PhD, though I left it open because it seems to vary from school to school whether they even allow going “straight to PhD” or want you to pass Go and collect an MS on the way. (Nottingham, for instance, implied that you had to get a Masters before PhD there unless you were an “exceptional case”).
Just the requirements for their specific program, I suppose. It seems to be the norm in Japan too (though they also seem to have a term called “research student” that you have to do as well that’s pre-masters but still post-undergrad).
They said you’re perfectly welcome to apply for the PhD program without an MS, it’s just that you were unlikely to get accepted with only a BS unless you were an “exceptional case”. Hey, they get the 25 GBP application fee either way.
ETA: They weren’t speaking in generalities like that you’re “worthless” on a philosophical or academic level if you went straight towards a PhD, it was just an admissions criterion for their program.
My local government paid for two of the years I spent in grad school in the US. Well, they didn’t pay tuition (that was waived by the school, they made me a “research assistant” rather than a TA), but they paid the same amount I would have gotten as a salary if I’d been a TA.
The Doctorate Fellowship program doesn’t give fixed-amount fellowships: what they do is pay living expenses. So depending on where you are, you’ll get different amounts. There are no strings attached along the lines of “you have to come back” or “you have to work in rural areas here”, but there is a limitation that you’re not allowed to teach. This is because the idea of the program is to make it easier for you to focus on your research, therefore finishing it in less time.
Masters weren’t recognized by the Spanish government until Bologna, with the exception of those in Labor Safety, so there were no governmental master’s fellowships. Then again, our old Licenciaturas and Ingenierías used to be at a level equivalent to other countries’ Masters (their first college degree would be equivalent to what we got before starting our specialty, or to the short-lived Ingenierías Técnicas and Diplomaturas).
My college in Spain pays a stipend to TAs but, unlike the one I got in the US, it’s not enough to live on unless you live with your parents.
Chances are that they will simply not accept you otherwise. It is supposed to be the Europe-wide standard, although in practice it is more of a loose guideline and the implementation can vary from program to program. And of course compliant programs are designed under that assumption. For example PhD programs may include very little traditional coursework because you are expected to have done all that when you got your MS.
Bi-lateral projects between a donor and beneficiary country often includes sending PhD students from the latter to study in the former. Come to think of it, how painful is 3-years tuition at the graduate level for a donor country? I’m assuming the donor will have realized much bigger gains from the project itself, whether in monetary terms or something else.
I can’t speak for the sciences, but it is generally a requirement in the humanities faculties in the UK to get a masters before PhD because the PhD is essentially just 3 years of work on a single topic. No classes (generally speaking), nothing else. It would be an awfully big jump from an undergraduate degree to a PhD, hence masters with all the research training and so on first.
It’s also difficult to get funding as an American student in the UK if your department has mostly government grants and scholarships on offer – I have no idea how it’d go with industry grants, though I imagine it would be easier.
From what I gather, in the US “not getting an MS first” is largely splitting hairs in most places. Doing a PhD entails doing the MS coursework, you just generally do more research than a masters student while the coursework is going on. In fact, since the dissertation is the hardest part it’s common for students to drop out of the dissertation work and “settle for an MS”, which they’ve already completed the requirements for, they just never got the piece of paper for it because they were going straight for a PhD.
But in the EU it’s now a general requirement (Bologna). There are schools which will let you do simultaneous work (i.e., you enter the Masters having already said you’re headed for a PhD, and your Master’s Thesis will be a part of your PhD’s), but since there were countries which already had that requirement, either it had to be put in for everybody or those had to get rid of their basic degrees. The first option was chosen (it actually fits market needs better).
The US model of PhD programme is significantly different to the UK (and Australia which is similar to the UK) and Europe tends to be different again.
However many countries programmes have a form of structured progression. This is often a result of hard won experience. The reality is that undergraduate performance is not enough of an indicator of ability to do research that some students simply won’t make it through, despite apparently great potential. Here, a long time ago a PhD student could essentially get a conceded pass in the form of a masters degree if it was apparent that their thesis was not up to scratch and they would not manage to get their research and thesis into shape enough for a PhD. This is a bad result all round. So a common approach is to enforce a staged degree. Sometimes you get a degree on the way to a PhD (eg MPhil, MSc, MA), in others you are required to explicitly enrol in the lower degree, and may either apply to convert the enrolment after a year or so to a PhD, or simply elect to stay in that programme and exit with that degree. Conversion approval is not automatic. Either way a student is much more assured of exiting with a degree, and if they are not going to make it through to a PhD, they exit early, rather than after having done the full time towards PhD. Everyone wins.
And the structure of a Masters differs from country to country (e.g. researched focused vs coursework focused, 1 year vs 2 years). I think typically they want “Masters/MPhil/BPhil or equivalent”. If you ask the department they should be able to explicitly tell you if there is any way around it in your particular case.
Do you have a cite for this? I ask purely out of academic interest.
