Loading Scholarship Gap Calculator…
The gap is what nobody has promised to pay yet. It is worked out over the whole course and then again year by year, because an award paid once and an award paid every year are worth very different amounts by the second year.
Whole years. Every cost below is a figure for one of them.
| Source | Amount | Paid |
|---|---|---|
Enter how many years the course runs, above zero.
Loans are deliberately not on this page. Borrowing closes a gap on paper without removing it, and a figure that counts a loan as funding tells you the year is paid for when what it means is that the year is deferred. Work out the gap first, then decide what to borrow against it.
Funding arrives in pieces and each piece arrives in its own envelope. A departmental bursary here, a trust award there, a promise from a relative, a summer of savings — every one of them is a real figure, and not one of the letters tells you what is still missing once all of them are counted. The shortfall is the only figure that decides whether you can go, and it is the one nobody sends you.
So this page asks for the costs of a single year, the number of years, and every source that has actually been confirmed. What comes back is the shortfall across the whole enrolment and then the same shortfall split year by year, which is usually where the surprise is hiding.
A scholarship that pays every year you remain in good standing is worth its face value multiplied by the years remaining. An entrance award, a relocation grant or a one-time hardship payment is worth exactly its face value, once, and that is true no matter how large it is. Adding both into a single pot and dividing by the length of the programme produces an average that describes no year you will actually live through.
Selecting the basis on each row is therefore the most consequential thing you do on this page. It costs a second, it is the question every funding office can answer over the phone, and getting it wrong in the optimistic direction is the failure mode that ends courses partway through.
The pattern repeats every autumn. A large award lands before enrolment, the first year is comfortable, and the money that felt like funding was in fact a single payment being remembered as an income. The page reports two rows for exactly this reason:
When the first row is covered and the second is not, a warning appears saying so in as many words. It is not a prediction of trouble; it is a statement that the money is front-loaded, which is worth knowing in September rather than fourteen months later.
There is no box for a loan here, and its absence is the design. Borrowing closes a shortfall on paper without removing it: the year gets paid for, and the payment is moved to a version of you who has graduated. A figure that counts credit as funding tells you the problem is solved when what it means is that the problem has been postponed with interest attached.
Work out the shortfall clean, then decide separately what to borrow against it. Those are two decisions and they deserve two conversations, one of which should be with somebody who can see the repayment terms.
Tuition and rent are entered without prompting. The lines that get left out are compulsory fees, course materials, travel home at the ends of terms, laboratory or studio charges, professional registration and the deposit that comes back only if nothing breaks. None of them is large; together they are frequently the difference between a shortfall you can work through and one you cannot.
Nothing on this page carries a suggested figure for any of that, because a suggested figure is a claim about your city and your course. Every box starts empty and stays empty until you fill it, and anything left blank counts as nothing rather than as a guess.
Put the name in and leave the amount empty. The page then lists it as named but not costed, which keeps the application visible on the page without letting an outcome you do not have yet reduce the shortfall you are planning against.
Whatever has genuinely been promised, on the basis it was promised. A relative offering a fixed sum each year is a renewable source; one offering help with the first term is a single payment, and the difference shows up in the second year rather than the first.
It means the figures you entered leave money over, which usually points at a cost line still empty rather than at genuine spare funds. Check materials, travel and fees before treating any of it as available, since a surplus is the easiest result to reach by omission.