1) Put (your) fees and funding in context
To really understand this situation you need to put yourself in the shoes of someone faced with a finance system that seems both inadequate and indifferent to the costs they will actually face as a postgraduate student.
What can you do about it?
A large number of your prospective postgraduates will find themselves in the above scenario each year. It’s one where a bit of understanding and empathy in marketing and recruitment messaging can make a big difference and achieve genuinely authentic engagement in the process.
There are lots of guides to the postgraduate loan system out there. Some are fairly vestigial. Others, like ours, are anything but (more on that in a moment). Yet if all you’re doing as a university is putting up a fairly boilerplate guide then you may be missing a big opportunity.
The students who are reading about postgraduate finance on your website aren’t just there to learn about postgraduate finance: they’re trying to work out how it will enable them to study at your university. So help them do that.
Relate the loan to typical fees for different categories of Masters. Even if it isn’t enough to cover them entirely (not necessarily your fault) you can still show how much smaller those fees look with the loan taken into account.
Even if you can’t eliminate the funding gap entirely, you’ll have made postgraduate study at your university look much more achievable. What’s more, you’ll also have demonstrated that you understand and empathise with the position those prospective students are in. (more…)