Fundraising Priorities

Graduate students at Worcester are tomorrow’s leaders, pushing forward the research happening in Oxford’s laboratories, libraries, and seminars. They go on to play outstanding roles in society, business and academia worldwide, forging new paths in their fields and expanding frontiers of knowledge. However, too many of Worcester’s graduate students do not have the security of full, assured funding to cover course fees and living costs. Our Old Members are crucial to fixing this and ensuring that the brightest minds choose Worcester as the launchpad to a bright future.

Early career fellowships give academics beginning their career the opportunity to pursue their innovative work. The years after a DPhil are a ‘cliff edge’, with hundreds of talented applicants for every Junior Research Fellowship position in Oxford or Cambridge. It is our responsibility to ensure those with the most to offer are able to build an academic career here at Worcester, and contribute their expertise to solving the world’s most pressing problems.

Tutorials make a student’s time at Worcester unique. Often inspiring, sometimes challenging, always thought-provoking, the tutorial system is at the heart of the academic growth all our undergraduates enjoy. Tutorials are a core part of Worcester, but are vulnerable to government funding levels which have been frozen since 2016. Each year the College subsidises the cost of every student’s education by £5,000. With our relatively small endowment, this is not financially sustainable, so Old Member support is crucial to giving tomorrow’s generation the same teaching opportunities you enjoyed.

To secure the future of tutorial teaching we aim to endow tutorial fellowships in all subjects. Our priority is to safeguard fellowships in the following subjects, which currently have no endowed fellows: Biology, Biochemistry, Classics, Earth Sciences, Geography, Music, Physics, Psychology.