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What a UK scholarship is actually worth

The median award is £3,000. The median degree costs £118,308.

On the cover: Old Joe, the clock tower at the University of Birmingham — one of the five universities publishing the most scholarships in our records. Photo: Balluwun-enjoyer / Wikimedia Commons (CC0).

The Bottom Line

The median award we hold is £3,000. Set against the £118,308 a median UK degree costs an international family, that is about one fortieth of the cost, or roughly a seventh of a single year's tuition.

That is not a reason to ignore scholarships. 56 awards are worth £10,000 or more and 20 are worth £20,000 or more, and those change a family's arithmetic considerably. It is a reason to find out which awards are genuinely open to you before you build a budget around them.

What you absolutely need to know:

  1. Most awards are smaller than families expect
  2. Seeing an award does not mean you can have it
  3. More awards are tied to where you are from than to your grades
  4. An award may be for one year, not for the full duration
  5. Just over half need a separate application; the rest come with your offer
  6. Fewer than half give you a scholarship deadline date
  7. A quarter of the awards on view were already closed when we read them

Almost every UK university publishes scholarships. 146 of the 148 we cover hold at least one, and between them we have read 1,086 awards. A scholarship page is one of the most encouraging things a family reads during an application.

It is also one of the hardest to act on. The value is usually there. Whether you can have it, whether it comes back in your second year, what you have to do to get it and by when are all published somewhere else, or not at all.

So the question this answers is not what is available. It is what is available to you, and what it actually takes off the bill.

1. Most awards are smaller than families expect

Half of the awards we can value sit between £1,500 and £5,000. The largest single award we hold is £53,000. 202 awards are worth less than £2,000.

Exhibit 1What a scholarship is worth, against what a degree costs

709 awards publishing a cash value, of 1,086 at 146 institutions. Source: Telariq data.

Some awards are published as a share of the fee rather than a sum. 59 are, and the median of those is 20% of tuition. 16 cover half the fee or more, and the largest covers all of it.

318 awards publish no value at all. The award exists, the eligibility is described, and what it is worth is not stated.

2. Seeing an award does not mean you can have it

This is the one that costs families the most time.

A scholarship page is a list of every award the institution offers, not a list of the awards open to you. 343 of the 1,086 are restricted to applicants from named countries. Others are for students progressing from that institution's own pathway course, for applicants from a partner school, for children of alumni, or for named sports and instruments.

Most awards do not state whether an international student qualifies at all. 98 say they are open to overseas applicants. The other 988 are silent on the question. Silence is not a refusal — it usually means the page was written for a general audience — but it does mean the answer is not on the page, and you will have to ask for it.

The practical consequence: read the eligibility line before you read the value. An award you cannot apply for is not a discount, however large it is.

3. More awards are tied to where you are from than to your grades

The largest single category is country or region, not academic merit. 276 awards are awarded on where an applicant is from, against 241 on grades.

Exhibit 2What UK scholarships are actually awarded for

1,086 awards at 146 institutions. Source: Telariq data.

But the awards for any one country are thin. India is the most frequently named country in the catalogue, and it appears on 17 awards across 16 institutions. A country-restricted award sounds targeted, and it is, which is exactly why there are so few of them for each country.

4. An award may be for one year, not for the full duration

This is the same trap as the annual fee, in a different place. A £3,000 award is £3,000 once, or £3,000 a year, and the two differ by £9,000 across a four-year course.

Exhibit 3Does the award come back next year?

1,086 awards at 146 institutions. Source: Telariq data.

228 awards are explicitly first year only. 275 do not say either way, and where a page does not say, the safe assumption for a budget is one year rather than four.

5. Just over half need a separate application; the rest come with your offer

604 awards require an application of their own. 406 are automatic — you are considered when you receive an offer, and there is nothing further to do. 76 do not say.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. An automatic award needs no diary entry. An award requiring an application has its own form, its own evidence and, usually, its own deadline — and it will not be awarded because you were a strong applicant if you did not apply for it.

6. Fewer than half give you a scholarship deadline date

474 of the 1,086 awards publish a date or a span of dates. The rest publish something else, or nothing.

Exhibit 4What the deadline field actually tells you, and whether you have to act on it

"Wording, but no date" means an entry year, "applications are open", or a pointer to another page. 1,086 awards at 146 institutions. Source: Telariq data.

123 awards ask you to apply and never say by when. That is the row to look at. An automatic award with no date costs you nothing; an award that wants a form and gives no deadline is a trap with your name on it.

Scholarship deadlines run on their own clock. Only 17 of the 1,086 awards mention UCAS in their deadline at all. Whatever date you are holding in your head from the UCAS cycle almost certainly does not govern the money.

7. A quarter of the awards on view were already closed when we read them

274 awards were closed at the point we read the page. 427 were open, 25 had not opened yet, and 360 did not say.

Exhibit 5Was the award open when we read it?

1,086 awards at 146 institutions. Source: Telariq data.

A closed award is not a dead one — most run on an annual cycle and reopen. But a page that still carries last year's award, with last year's value and last year's closing date, looks identical to a page carrying this year's. The award you are reading about may be one you cannot apply for until next autumn, at a value that has not been confirmed.

Our advice

Work in this order: eligibility, then whether it repeats, then what you have to do, then by when. Value comes last, because an award you cannot have at a number you cannot bank is worth nothing.

Then ask. Almost everything a family needs to know about a scholarship is a short email to the admissions office: am I eligible for this as an international student, does it apply in every year of my course, do I need to apply separately, and what is the deadline. Get the answer in writing.

Confirm scholarship eligibility and value with the university before you count it in your budget.

The not so fine print: what was excluded in this report

  • Government and external scholarships, including Chevening and country-specific schemes — these are Telariq's record of what universities themselves publish
  • Postgraduate awards, except where an award covers both levels
  • Bursaries and hardship funds that are not published as named awards
  • What any individual applicant was actually awarded, which no institution publishes

A note on this guide. This is what we found when we read each provider's own pages. Its purpose is to show you that options exist and where to start looking. There will be routes we haven't found yet, and some here may have changed since we checked — so treat it as a starting point, not a complete list, and confirm everything with the provider before you rely on it.

Have a question? We'd love to hear from you — admin@telariq.com

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