Playbook, university
Tuition fee questions, where the right answer depends on who is asking
Almost every other trade in this set has one price list. A university has a matrix: home and overseas rates, a different figure per course, a different figure per year of entry, and a separate set of numbers for accommodation and living costs. The assistant's job is to route somebody to the right cell, not to guess which one they are in.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for pricing questions holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The same course has at least two headline fees, and which one applies turns on a fee status assessment the university itself carries out.
- Fees are published per year of entry, so an applicant reading in one cycle and starting in the next is looking at the wrong number without knowing it.
- The question is usually asked by somebody comparing several institutions, so a refusal loses them rather than delaying them.
- Funding, loans and bursaries are separate systems with their own eligibility, and conflating them with the fee itself is the most common error in the reply.
How it arrives
- how much is the tuition fee for computer science
- what are the international student fees
- do i pay home or overseas fees
- how much is accommodation per year
- is there a scholarship for masters students
- when do i have to pay the tuition fee
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The fee table for the current entry year | Per course, with the home and overseas figures side by side and the entry year stated in the heading. A table that does not name its year becomes wrong in September without anybody editing it. |
|---|---|
| How fee status is decided | The criteria, who assesses it, and what an applicant can do if they disagree. This is the question underneath most fee questions and it is rarely on the fee page. |
| Funding, loans and bursaries | Kept as its own document with its own eligibility, so the assistant cannot blend a bursary the reader does not qualify for into an answer about a fee they do. |
| Living costs and accommodation rates | Published per residence and per contract length, because a single annual figure is the fastest way to mislead an international applicant budgeting a visa application. |
The reply
For entry in the year shown on our fee page, the published tuition fee for that course is listed separately for home and overseas students. Which one applies to you depends on a fee status assessment we carry out, so I cannot tell you from here which figure is yours. The fee page has both, and the fee status criteria are on the page linked from it.
It gives the reader the number they came for and refuses only the part that genuinely depends on an assessment. It also names the year, because a fee quoted without one is a fee that will be wrong within months.
Where it stops
The trigger. Anything that turns on the applicant's own circumstances: fee status, a scholarship application already submitted, a visa dependency, or an instalment arrangement.
That depends on your own circumstances and I cannot assess those from here. If you leave your name, an email and a short note about your situation, the admissions team will come back to you with the right figure for your application.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- A single fee figure without saying which year of entry and which fee status it belongs to.
- Whether a particular applicant will be assessed as home or overseas.
- That a scholarship or bursary is available to somebody without their eligibility being checked.
- Anything that reads as advice on how to structure finances to change a fee status.
Questions
- Should we index the fee page or upload the fee table?
- Point it at the page. Fee tables are updated on an annual cycle by a team that edits the page, not the copy you uploaded, and an uploaded snapshot is the material most likely to be answering with last year's figures next autumn.
- Can it tell an international applicant what they will actually pay?
- It can give them the published overseas rate and the accommodation rates, which is most of a budget. What it cannot do is confirm their fee status, and it should say so rather than implying the published figure is settled.
- What about fees for a course that is not running next year?
- That is a content problem rather than an assistant problem. A course page left up after the course closed will be indexed and quoted. The audit before launch is where you find those.
Keep reading
- Everything for a universityApplicants and enrolled students ask different things. What a university assistant can answer about entry, fees and visas, and what it must never predict.
- Handling pricing questions in generalPublished price versus the price for this buyer. Bands, ranges and from pricing, and why a firm number for unscoped work is the damaging failure.
- Open days, tours and visit days, and how to route each oneOpen days, campus tours and applicant days are three different things. An assistant that can explain each one saves the enquiries team most of its inbox.
- Access questions from applicants, and the line between information and supportTwo different questions arrive as one: is the campus accessible, and will I be supported. The second must never be answered from a web page.
- Data requests on a university site, and why silence is the failureDeletion, access and correction requests arrive on the enquiries channel with a legal clock attached. Explain the route and never close the conversation.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.