Unis are paying students up to £4,000 just to defer a year

Unis are paying students thousands of pounds just to defer a year, as the institutions find too many people are accepting places.

In one case, 10 students applying to Sunderland’s paramedic course were paid £4,000 in exchange for delaying entry from April to September.

Elsewhere, Exeter, Nottingham, and Manchester are among the top unis making the big offers, according to data uncovered by The Times.

Nottingham offered 260 medical applicants £2,000 to delay their start date by a year. Five accepted, whilst none of the 59 graduate nursing students offered £1,000 by the uni to delay accepted.

At Exeter, 40 applicants to the MSc applied psychology course were offered not just a grand but a guaranteed first choice of accommodation. None accepted.

Manchester offered £1,000 of incentives to 190 management applicants, but just one took the offer up.

In response to the statistics, Exeter and Manchester said the offers were a rare occurrence, whilst Sunderland said they weren’t due to oversubscription.

Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner told The Times it’s “a sign of both our broken funding model, and our admissions process, that universities are spending valuable resources on paying students to stay away”.

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