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Making Postgraduate Funding Make More Sense to More People
- Less than 1/3 of prospective domestic UK Masters students identify PG loans and other government support as their primary funding option
- Awareness and engagement with specific finance and scholarships decreases with age
- Around 1/4 of audiences at all ages expect to work during a Masters
This is because postgraduate funding – in the UK at least – does not make sense.
The potential for student confusion around Masters funding was the subject of one of my first ever posts here: on why the UK Masters loan felt like a disorientating bait and switch, designed to baffle anyone coming directly from an undergraduate degree.
This is still true, but now the system is less fit for purpose (as the loan hasn’t kept pace with fees or living costs) and, post-Covid, more domestic postgraduates are older ‘returner’ students who are less aware of the PG system.
So, we’re in a world where postgraduate funding is more complex (being both inherently confusing and increasingly incomplete) and poorly understood.
Making it add up
The blog I linked earlier was actually inspired not by data (we’d yet to build our near real-time insight into postgraduate audiences) but by hundreds of conversations with prospective students at our Postgrad LIVE events. Here I would repeatedly chat with people thinking about a Masters (or PhD) and quickly realised how few of them were actually aware of their options (and how quickly they were misled by their knowledge of the undergraduate system).
I used to call this ‘anecdote at scale’ (if enough people ask the same things, that’s probably telling you something about general knowledge and understanding) and these days I can confirm it.
Here’s Pulse data from the second half of 2025, asking domestic Masters audiences how they plan to fund their study, broken down into three broad age brackets:
From anecdote to data
The blog I linked earlier was actually inspired not by data (we’d yet to build our near real-time insight into postgraduate audiences) but by hundreds of conversations with prospective students at our Postgrad LIVE events. Here I would repeatedly chat with people thinking about a Masters (or PhD) and quickly realised how few of them were actually aware of their options (and how quickly they were misled by their knowledge of the undergraduate system).
I used to call this ‘anecdote at scale’ (if enough people ask the same things, that’s probably telling you something about general knowledge and understanding) and these days I can confirm it.
Here’s Pulse data from the second half of 2025, asking domestic Masters audiences how they plan to fund their study, broken down into three broad age brackets:
A lot of things about this chart make sense. I would expect the loan to be the most popular option and for older audiences to be more likely to turn to employers or charitable / third party grants (though I’m not surprised that few people expect this to be their go-to).
But what less immediate sense is also more interesting:
First, less than 1/3 of people expect government funding (including the loan) to be their first port of call. That’s rather low for a universally available funding option that, for all its flaws, still covers a big chunk of the cost.
Second, the proportion selecting ‘work during study’ is consistently high. I’d have expected older audiences to be more likely to turn to this and they are… but only by a single percentage point for 35-44 year-olds.
Thirdly, older audiences seem less inclined to prioritise ‘sector-specific’ funding (support specifically designed for PG study from the government and from universities).
We also ask audiences another, very simple, question: do you understand the student finance options in your country:
Data is for UK domestic Masters audiences again and, again, there’s a clear trend with age.
Intention to use the loan decreases with age (corroborating what we saw for students’ funding plans). But awareness of the loan actually decreases slightly more: 35-44 year-olds are 88% less likely to use the loan if they’re aware, but they’re 100% less likely to be aware in the first place.
If prospective students don’t understand funding, we really need to
Thanks to the loan, domestic Masters funding should be the simplest area of PG funding – certainly compared to the scarcity of international funding and the far greater complexity of PhD funding. But the data confirms what the 'anecdote at scale' always indicated: things are far from actually being simple.
Prospective UK postgraduate students are surprisingly unaware of their most universally available Masters funding option. Around 1/4 of 18-24 year-olds don’t fully understand it, rising to 1/3 of 35-44 year-olds (and remember, the PG intake is getting older). This means they need information and guidance about it
And when they do understand it, they’re (quite rightly) not relying on it. 67% of 18-24 year-olds and 48% of 35-44 year-olds say they’ll use the loan, but only 33% and 26% identify it as their main funding option. So, they’ll need information and guidance about how to build up and connect a portfolio of other funding options too.
The diversity of postgraduate audiences also adds extra nuance and complexity here, as ‘continuers’ and ‘returners’ have different needs and intentions, formed by different information gaps.
But filling information gaps one of the simplest things you can do when guiding and engaging prospective students and, when it comes to funding, it’s probably one of the most effective.
You can equip yourself to do this, of course – and our student guides to postgraduate funding are the most detailed and wide-ranging around.
But if you want a comprehensive overview designed specifically for PG professionals and covering far more than just the domestic Masters funding I’ve taken a look at here; well, that’s exactly what Maree will be offering in our training session this month.
