Focusing on Graduate Scholarships

5 Jul

*Graduate students at the H B Allen Centre © John Cairns*

Keble College is home to a flourishing community of nearly 600 graduates on both research and taught degrees, drawn from across the full range of subjects available at Oxford. This includes the largest Said Business School cohort of any college – 203 this year on courses including EMBAs, MSc in Major Project Management, and MSc in Financial Economics. Our graduates come from all over the world, with over 40 different countries represented at our last count.

The new H B Allen Centre provides space for 230 full-time graduates plus short-stay accommodation for up to 20 part-time graduates or visiting Fellows. State-of-the-art facilities include two large common rooms, a café, a gym, a lecture theatre, laundry facilities and an onsite Porters’ Lodge open 24 hours a day. We organise a rich programme of social and academic events throughout the year to enrich students’ experiences.

The Centre is a fantastic addition to the College, but we now need a scholarship fund to match. On average, the current cost for a graduate student is £30,000 per year. We are now focused on increasing the funds available for graduate scholarships to encourage the best students from the UK, EU and overseas to apply, and the most talented Keble students who achieve first-class undergraduate degrees to stay on with us.

Traditional funding sources for graduate scholarships, e.g. the UK’s research councils, are declining. Many prospective postgraduates rely on being able to secure funding through highly competitive and limited scholarship schemes. Many international students cannot access government support and UK government graduate loans are insufficient to cover the costs of graduate study, leaving many students with an unbridgeable funding gap or reliant on personal or family support.

Funding opportunities can be skewed to science, technology, engineering and maths subjects (STEM) in a progressively technological society. At Keble, Humanities students represent 27% of undergraduates, but only 9% at graduate level – this is a reflection of the reduction in available funding. We are very aware of how the critical thinking and cultural knowledge demonstrated by humanities graduates ensures that they are prepared for the future labour market, and we are delighted that at Keble funding for graduate scholarships is now increasing across the humanities, social sciences and sciences.

Recently funded scholarships

The highly competitive Weidenfeld-Hoffmann Scholarships have been running at Oxford since 2007. There are currently 35 Scholars across seven colleges, and Keble is proud to take five Scholars on the programme each year, all funded by philanthropy. The course includes, alongside the taught Master’s programmes the students are on, a tailor-made Leadership Programme to jump-start the ambitions of young leaders, equipping them to return to their regions and countries of origin to make essential and meaningful contributions to the fields of Sustainability, Business, Law, Education, and Digital Technologies, Governance, Diplomacy and Health. This year, our WHT Scholars came from Bolivia, Israel, Slovakia, Malaysia and Pakistan.
In 2022/23, Oxford University launched the Graduate Scholarship Scheme for Ukraine Refugees, with a number of participating colleges contributing funding to host a graduate on the scheme. Keble welcomed one Ukrainian Scholar, funded jointly by the KA and a generous alumnus. Next year, the scheme will continue with funding provided by XTX Markets Academic Sanctuaries Fund. The scheme was launched by Professor Lionel Tarassenko, President of Reuben College and Keble alumnus (1975 Engineering Science).
Thanks to an incredibly generous matched giving scheme at Oxford University, implemented to support fundraising for Graduate Scholarships, we are able to secure matched funding for Scholarships for graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds, including the Black Academic Futures scheme (BAFS), refugees (RAFS) and those coming from a care background (CAFS). This year at Keble, we welcomed three students funded by the BAFS. Next year, we are delighted to be able to host another three students on the scheme. This has been made possible by a donor who provided a gift of £33,000 during the March 2023 Giving Day, which enabled us to access £66,000 in matched funding.
Last year, we announced a new graduate scholarship in History, funded in memory of Professor Angus Hawkins — celebrated historian of Victorian politics, and biographer of Lord Derby. The Scholarship will be awarded to a DPhil student. We are indebted to Dr Ralph Walter and support from Megan Dent (2011) and Michael Dent, and others, in enabling the scholarship to be endowed in perpetuity.
The Sloane Robinson Foundation have confirmed that they will continue their generous support of graduate students at Keble, and have pledged to increase their annual provision to part-fund 15 graduates per year for a further four years to 2026-27.
Keble, in conjunction with the Law Faculty, is pleased to offer the Lui Scholarship in Law. The award, worth £25,000, is available to students accepted for the Bachelor in Civil Law (BCL) who are ordinarily resident in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Preference is given to students from poorer backgrounds. This Scholarship is generously funded by Keble alumnus Roger Lui (1993 Jurisprudence).

For more information on funding of graduate scholarships, please contact Rachel Page on rachel.page@keble.ox.ac.uk.

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