Loading Tuition Cost Comparison…
Each offer is totalled over its own course length, so what is being compared is the money it takes to finish, not the money it takes to enrol. Enter every figure in one currency — nothing here converts between them.
| Offer | Years | Tuition a year | Other fees a year | Living costs a year | Awards and scholarships a year | One-off costs | Whole course |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| needs the length of the course in years and tuition | |||||||
| needs the length of the course in years and tuition |
Give at least one offer a course length in years and a tuition figure. Everything else can stay blank.
Left out of the comparison for now: Offer 1 and Offer 2. An offer is priced once it has a course length and a tuition figure.
Cost is one column of a decision with a dozen. Nothing here can see teaching quality, supervision, the strength of a department, whether the city suits you or what either qualification is worth to an employer afterwards. A cheaper offer is a cheaper offer, and that is the whole of what this arithmetic says about it.
An offer letter quotes a year because a year is what an institution bills for. A degree is not a year, and the moment two courses run for different numbers of them, an annual figure stops being a comparison and starts being a coincidence. So every offer entered here is multiplied out over its own stated length, and the length is printed beside the total rather than folded into it.
That choice has a consequence worth naming. Where one course finishes in three years and another in four, the two totals answer the same question — what does it cost to walk away holding the qualification — but they cover different amounts of your life. The extra year is a year of teaching on one side and a year of earning on the other, and this page prices neither. A per-year ranking is therefore withheld rather than shown with a warning attached.
Tuition is the number everybody quotes and it is often the least variable part of the answer. Compulsory fees attach themselves to registration, examinations, laboratories and materials, and they are quoted separately precisely because they do not fit the headline. Housing and food swing further still between one city and another, and they run for every month you are enrolled rather than only during term.
Awards come off, one-off costs go on, and both are entered on the basis they are actually paid. An award renewed annually is worth its face value multiplied by the length of the course; a deposit, a visa or a flight is paid once and multiplying it would be an error in the opposite direction. Every blank box is counted as zero, and the page lists which ones it did that to, because an unfilled living-costs column is the usual reason a distant offer arrives looking cheap.
Take two entries typed purely to show the shape of the arithmetic. Offer one runs four years at 10,000 a year with 9,000 of living costs and no award; offer two runs four years at 12,000 with the same 9,000 and a 2,000 renewable scholarship. The first totals 76,000, the second 76,000 as well, and two very different letters turn out to be the same money.
Nudge the scholarship to 3,000 and the second offer moves 4,000 ahead over the course, all of it attributable to one line. That attribution is the point of the itemised difference: a verdict that says one offer is cheaper by four thousand is unusable until you can see whether the four thousand is tuition, a bursary or somebody guessing at rent. Nothing above is a claim about what anything costs — the figures exist only to be replaced by yours.
This is arithmetic on money and it sees nothing else. Teaching quality, the strength of a department, who would supervise you, whether the city is somewhere you can live for three years, how the qualification reads to an employer afterwards and whether you would finish at all are absent from every column. They are usually the reasons a decision goes the other way, and they should be.
Currency is the other hard limit. Two offers priced in different currencies are not comparable here at all, because converting them needs a rate and this page has none. Convert them yourself first, note the rate and the day you used, and put both offers into the table in a single currency — otherwise the total is a sum of unlike things wearing a single symbol.
They belong in any comparison that is about affording the course rather than about the invoice. Rent and food frequently differ between two cities by more than the tuition does, and leaving them out systematically favours whichever offer happens to sit in the more expensive place.
Not in the awards column, which is multiplied across every year of the course. Either average it down yourself, or use the scholarship gap page instead, which keeps renewable and one-off funding apart on purpose and reports the first year separately from the ones after it.
Nothing at all, and that is a real omission. A shorter course releases you into work or further study twelve months sooner, which is worth something this page cannot estimate without knowing what you would earn. Read a longer course costing less as costing less over more time.
Almost certainly not. When every line matches, the totals match, and the page says so rather than inventing a winner from a rounding difference. If the lines differ but the totals agree, the itemised difference shows which ones cancelled each other out.