Offers, firm and insurance

[Isthiscorrect]

Ok I'm a little bit confused and need help to understand this.
Ds has 5 offers, very fortunate I know. Realistically he applied to one prestigious (not Oxbridge) uni not expecting to get accepted. However he did get accepted. The problem is because it's so respected everyone (not me and dh) expects him to automatically put that as his first choice. The issue, as we understand it from the uni website, student room etc, is it seems this uni doesn't offer the uni experience in the way most other unis do. Since before he even completed his UCAS he always wanted to go to uni B. But now he is swayed, partly by the opportunities uni A will offer and partly by the name on his CV.

The real problem though is uni B who gave him a lower offer than all the others, who all gave the same offer. So he has to put uni B as his insurance, which means, I think, the other uni will be his firm. However he is expected to achieve higher than even his firm. So if he does his best he doesn't get to go to the uni he wants?

I'm not sure I've explained this clearly but I really am struggling to articulate and feel I may have overlooked something obvious?

How do you get to £26k, Ventura, as a matter of interest? Does that include your estimate of living and travel expenses? Because my DS's fees are £10k next year for a science masters. And my DD's fees for a law related masters are the same....

do you know about Adjustment - look on ucas website, even when he gets his results he can 'adjust' to a different uni IF he does better than expected. It's done under the clearing process. He may also come under the free market offer where uni's are able to recruit as many as they want from a certain grade, I think it's ABB this year, you would need to check.

Get an appt with an independent careers adviser - not the careers teacher at school as they will want uni A as this would sound better in the school's prospectus. They should be able to talk you through it all.

Thing is headless Adjustment won't be of any use to the OPs son as he already has an offer from a really really top uni and if he did want to go to Cambridge, they don't enter adjustment.

beck imperial reckon £15k a year living expenses for postgraduates.

I'd better start checking down the back of the sofa for loose change in that case!

I get to £26k by assuming that postgrad students need a pillow to rest their heads on and a meal from time to time BeckAndCall. You surely can't be serious that you hadn't factored that in? Most students can only dream of their parents finding that sort of loose change. It's pretty sad, since it has no bearing on talent whatsoever and the sum involved represents near enough the average annual income in the UK. At the PhD level it becomes more meritocratic, which is obviously good.

To be more specific, a home Chemistry student at Oxford doing the MChem will need £9000 for fees plus living expenses of c. £11000 and a home law student will need £15, 345 plus those living expenses. Hence the £26,000.

Don't worry ventura, the loose change down the back of the sofa comment was, you know, light hearted.

I am hoping though that its not that much more expensive than his undergrad years - the London factor makes a fair bit of difference though.

I do think its unfair that there is no student loan available for PGT - but if he'd done a 4 year under grad masters then he'd be covered - but that's just not industry specific enough. Oh well, DH and I will just have to keep doing the lotto ( again, joking!)

The general point is serious though BeckAndCall.

Surely if your DS is doing an industry specific science masters he ought get funding? Not surprised about your DD. £9k is on the light side though, what sort of law course is she doing?

Not necessarily. Separate masters are often not funded. It's known as the "broken bridge" because people can't get from first degree to doctorate . HEFCE data from July 2013 shows that students from quintile 5 (wealthiest backgrounds) are more likely to do a taught masters than students in quintile 1 (least wealthy backgrounds). There's a lot of discussion at the moment about extending the loan system to cover Taught masters degrees, but they can't afford to, because undergraduates are not repaying their loans as fast as they predicted they would.

There is always the career development loan, but it's not like a student loan, it's much more commercial in what it expects from students. beck might want to check out studentmoneysaver.com.

Just to confuse you, ventura the oxford MCHEM isn't a taught masters, it's the fourth year of the standard undergraduate course, so they would get normal student funding ;)

Thanks for the tips, MNetters, they're helpful. We're just at the stage of trying to find any sources of appropriate funding.

For DS, the uni has some of its own source of funding - we don't qualify for any sort of bursary but there are some just random opportunities which see to be 'out of a hat' - but these are few. There are also 5 or 6 industry based scholarships available which DS is getting right on, but statistically, the odds are against that. And then he's headed down the road of looking at what the major companies in that industry might have to offer. So the channels are not yet exhausted. There were also the two gap years and the money earned then to be used to support him but that seems to have evaporated.....

For DD she has the opportunity of a scholarship if she get a first, so that's where her attention is focused right now.

And lets not mention that youngest DD is about to go up to uni in October too so all three of them will be needing support at the same time! ( and I said my lottery comment was just a joke!....)

Sorry isthiscorrect, I've hijacked your thread. Let get back to you now :)

The OP seems to be busy, I am sure she will be back.

Encourage the youngest to do a four year course with an integral masters. That's what DS1 has done and he is in his fourth year now, and will start a fully funded doctorate next year.

Yes, educatingme its definitely the best option for her as her subject is fairly specific and the uni she's going to has the best range of specialist options available and she knows what she wants to do (ie doctorate in a very specific field).

DS was on a four year programme but decided at the end of year two that he wanted to move into a specialist sub area which wasn't offered at that uni and so opted for a BSc only. If he'd have decided earlier that this is what he wants to do, it wouldn't have made any difference as it's so specialised he couldn't have covered it in an UG masters anyway. So is not like I'm thinking 'if only he'd decided sooner' - it's very different.

And DD1 enrolled on the BSc option rather than MSc because she wasn't clear where she was going to go. She is now, and was just last summer persuaded on to the MSc option by all the fees being waived, and an assured path to a funded PhD. However she is a Science student.

All I can say is that for good humanities masters that boost your employability the money is being found, and actually on my Masters they were disproportionately not from affluent backgrounds but had worked in high earning but not high level jobs that they could continue part time, shift work etc.

I discouraged my DD from a specialist degree and specialist uni because I am not convinced she will want to or be able to work in the rather narrow field she aspires to. She is a bit of a dreamer but with an iron will, proved by getting where she is already with moderate dyslexia and dyspraxia, so the possibility of a Masters at a specialist uni might be a path there but only if it is still what she wants and she has already built up her CV and worked through an apprenticeship. I think having to find the money to do it will be no bad thing in terms of making sure it is the right thing to do.

Last para is DD2

Re 'prestige' universities.

95% of people end up working for companies with 10 e'ees or less.

It's generally the McKinsey's and PWCs of this world who target certain universities for recruitment. And they're the companies that are shedding 1,000s of jobs.

The most important thing is to pick a uni that suits you, your interests and your aspirations. Not to fill someone else's idea of what's prestigious or not.

In this case though it is not just prestige, it is about the quality of the course, and the opportunities it would offer to get involved in the political scene of the capital city. No one has advised to go for the prestige, rather not to discount the opportunity because of preconceptions about student life in London, with qualification of the advice there might always be the chance of doing a Masters there if it is still his ambition to get involved in politics at the end of the student experience he is after elsewhere.

Of course if he is really wanting to get into politics then senuas advice to go to Oxford might be the most sound. We seem to have a lot of politicians who have followed that path and they are very openminded and with lots of experience of mixing with the rest of society

unexpected that is a really striking statistic 95% of people end up working for companies with 10 e'ees or less. Can you find the link to the data? I'd be very interested.

I think my advice relates more to this being politics, where Uni A has a strong reputation, and given the importance in politics of having a strong network.

Educating I assumed a mobile was involved?

being dim here shooting, you mean its a typo? but the rest of the argument suggests it isnt?

It does look a bit odd - for a start, about 6m people work in the UK public sector. There are 26m working people in the UK, so 23% of them are public sector workers.

The there's the fact that we ought to be looking at graduate employment- excluding the unskilled caring professions which skew the numbers both ways (lots of small business but also lots of public sector).

if you look at ONS data, the nearest dataset would be the monthly "vacancies by size of business report" which as at December 2013 shows that 15% of all vacancies were in businesses employing 1-9 people; so 85% were in bigger businesses. 42% were in businesses employing over 2,500 staff and 60% in over 250 staff. I think the data excludes public sector, hard to tell.

Where's your data from, unexpected? or was it a typo- easily done, but I shall be disappointed if it was, as that does sound interesting

Might be me being dim, assumed the 10 e'ees bit was a typo / predictive text / autocorrect ? Can't work out what it is a typo etc. of though......

The rest I got.

not sure- the argument I think was that smaller companies dont care where you went to Uni so, given most jobs are with smaller companies, why bother with Uni A for the sake of it?