Results tagged “Free Degrees” from Education and Training

I blogged a few weeks back about Lyndi Smith’s forthcoming useful (groundbreaking?) book Free Degrees (White Lion Press) which was published earlier this week. Now Smith has launched a website — Degrees for Free — to supplement it. More grist to the mill for impoverished students or for those who can’t ever see how to get started financially even once they’ve been offered a place.

It includes articles dealing with topics such as how to set up a mechanism to receive gifts to your ‘training fund’ online - often the preferred option since cheques are now obsolescent and cash tricky to send.

I also enjoyed 187 ways to save money as a student. Suggestions include buying second hand books rather new, walking or cycling rather than getting the bus and planning menus to share with your housemates to keep food costs down. None of these is particularly original, of course, but perhaps these are the common sense things which each new intake of drama and other students need to be reminded of. And anyone with a money saving tip can add it to the list which seems a good idea.

The website also offers tools and links and you can buy Free Degrees directly as well as reading selected extracts from it.

Lyndi Smith, about whom there is an article in the Music Theatre Supplement in this week’s issue of The Stage, is well worth listening to. She raised £26,000 and funded herself for two years’ training at RADA without incurring any debt at all - a remarkable achievement.

Although she concedes that there is a limit to the amount of money available to students via grants, bursaries and sponsorship, Smith believes that there are infinite sums to be raised by individual students entrepreneurially organising events - something drama and other performing arts students are particularly well placed to do.

One of the Big Scandals of 21st century educational life is the routine saddling of almost all higher education students - and drama students in particular - with massive debts before they even start work. If we really valued education we would make it freely available at all levels (as it was when I left school in the 1960s) rather than charging rising contributory tuition fees and making most students pay for their own accommodation. Of course free provision would mean fewer students. And HE providers would have to be more selective — which wouldn’t sit well politically, because the government needs as many 18-21 year olds in higher education in order to keep unemployment figures down. So it won’t change.

But can you outfox the system? Is there any way of funding yourself through drama school or whatever without incurring crippling debts (apart from getting yourself born into a family which can afford to support you)? Enter a forthcoming new book called Free Degrees by Lyndi Smith. Having been offered an acting place at RADA in 1998, Smith - now associate director of Mad Half Hour Theatre Company - was determined to find debt-free funding to pay for her course. She raised over £26,000 from more than 350 different sources.

Her account of how she did it - and how other people might do it - is subtitled “How to fund your own education and avoid student debt”. It is both inspirational and exhausting because you don’t single-handedly raise that sort of money without a great deal of hard work underpinned by admirable creative thinking. Lyndi Smith - about whom there will be more in the Music Theatre supplement in The Stage on 28 May - shows that it can be done. Her very practical book (published by White Lion Press) should be recommended reading for every sixth former or intending student.

Meanwhile let’s hear your views about funding training. Who should pay? Would it be better to have fewer students properly funded than more students largely left to fend financially for themselves only later to face lack of suitable work opportunities? Has anyone else raised funds for training as Lyndi Smith did?