A foundation year, or another year of school?
For a student whose grades are close but whose qualification is not recognised, this is the question that decides two years rather than one.
Every intake there are students whose grades are nearly there and whose qualification is not the one a UK department recognises. There are two honest routes, they cost different amounts of money and time, and the choice is usually made for the wrong reason.
What each one actually is
A foundation year is a year at the university, taught on the campus, assessed by the department, ending in a guaranteed place on the degree if you pass it. You are a student of that university from September. You have the card, the library, the accommodation and the friends.
Another year of school is a year somewhere else, ending in another application with no guarantee attached to it at all. You may come out with better grades and still be applying into a competitive cycle with everybody else.
What it costs, and what it saves
The foundation year costs more in fees - it is a year of university tuition rather than a year of school - and considerably less in risk, because the place at the end of it is written down.
It also starts the clock on being here, and that turns out to matter more than the prospectus suggests. The bank account, the doctor, the bus route, the part of a city you know your way around, the six people you will still know in third year. Students who take the foundation route almost always say the first year of the degree was easier because the first year of the country was already behind them.
The fees are the visible cost. The year of not being here is the invisible one.
When it is the wrong answer
Two cases, and we say so plainly when we see them.
- If the grades are a long way short rather than close, a foundation year papers over a gap that reappears in the second term of the degree, by which point you have paid for two years.
- If the degree you want is one of the few that does not accept a foundation route - some medicine, some law, a handful of conservatoire courses - then no amount of passing it helps, and the honest answer is a different route or a different course.
How to decide
We price both routes in full before anybody decides: tuition, living costs and the extra year of each, side by side on one page, with the guarantee written next to the one that has it.
It is usually the second page that settles it rather than the first.
