After lobbying by Cambridge SU, the University has committed to scrap the doctoral application fee and reduce the Master’s application fee to £50 for the next application cycle.
One of the biggest manifesto points for myself, as Postgraduate AEP, and Anjum, your Postgraduate President, was to scrap the postgraduate application fee. Cambridge SU believes that studying at the University should be an opportunity based on academic merit, not financial. We knew that this was an ambitious goal,, considering the extortionate £75 fee each applicant has to pay is a revenue stream for the University.
The fee is a significant barrier to postgraduate study at Cambridge and prevents talented prospective students, both domestic or international, from applying.
Earlier this year, we collected testimonies from people who had applied, or had considered applying, to study at Cambridge at the postgraduate level. Many of the respondents were current postgraduates at Cambridge. Over 98% of the respondents called for the fee to be removed and for the University to improve the accessibility of it’s postgraduate courses.
After a term of campaigning and lobbying, your postgraduate officers, Anjum and I, have made it happen, and the University has committed to scrap the doctoral application fee and to reduce Masters fees.
The University is making steps towards prioritising accessibility over profit. We hope this decision signals further change, making the University more accessible for postgraduate students.
The fight for accessible postgraduate education is not over. When we were elected into our positions we promised you, as the student body, that we would scrap all postgraduate application fees. While this is a great step in the right direction, the fee still exists for Masters students. This issue is personally very important to me, as someone who has recently finished a master's course. There was always this constant feeling of being overlooked and deprioritized by the University as it sought to cater for undergraduates and doctoral students. This decision to not remove fees for master’s students is testament to that.
Over the next term, Cambridge SU will be looking into how we can get a further commitment from the University to scrap the Master’s fee, and also examine how we can improve other aspects of Master’s student life in the process.
I want to say a huge thank you to Anjum and the Democracy and Representation team at the SU who I have worked alongside to make such an important change so quickly.
Let’s make this term one to remember!