If the project is advertised as "non-EU/UK students eligible" then you may well be eligible to apply. It does not necessarily mean that funding will be available to you.

UK newspapers publish university league tables every year. Books such as the Times Good University Guide, The Virgin Alternative Guide to British Universities and, The Guardian University Guide are all good publications, but tend to be geared towards undergraduate degrees. The Guardian League Tables are available on the web, but again are really for potential undergraduates.

The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) rates university teaching and can be found at www.qaa.ac.uk. The RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) is a good guide to the quality of an individual department.

Whichever rating system you use make sure you look at the ratings for the subject area and not the institution as a whole. Each university has strengths and weaknesses.

A funding section will appear soon on this site, but you should be prepared for a big loan. Funding for Masters courses is like rocking horse dung. Ask your new department in Edinburgh for advice, what funding is available is probably subject specific and the university may also offer internal scholarships. Even if your lucky enough to get some sort of scholarship it won't cover all your costs, so you'll need to look for a career development or graduate loan.

The completion rates you mention are very low. This is an extract from The Guardian September 3, 2002:

"The good news is that the number of postgraduates who do complete has risen enormously in the last few years. The most dramatic improvements have been in the arts and social sciences, which used to suffer appallingly high attrition rates. In the early 1980s, only 30% of funded PhD students in the social sciences submitted a thesis within four years; last year, 76% did. In the arts and humanities, the four-year submission rate for funded students has increased from 34% in 1993 to 71% today.

These improvements have come about in part because the research councils have insisted on them. The councils will cut off a department's (or, in some cases, an entire university's) supply of postgraduate students if submission rates drop below a certain level. The Arts and Humanities Research Board sanctions departments that fail to get theses out of half their students. The Economic and Social Research Council demands a 60% submission rate across the board."

It's also important to note that these figures don't include people who submit their thesis after the 4 year deadline. A low 3 year submission rate is probably to be expected anywhere, but it sounds like your institution has particular problems and may even be exploiting self financed students, as with performance like that they won't be receiving any Research Council funding.

To find out about eligability and funding visit PhDs explained and our Funging pages.

This scoring system gives you a fair idea of the sort of applications people are looking for. Remember that this is not a standard system, just one used by one department in one institution and that in most cases a good interview performance will make most scoring irrelevant.

RAE is the Research Assessment Exercise rating. This takes place every 5 or 6 years (the last one was in 2001) and determines the level of research funding a department will receive until the next RAE. The top mark is 5* (some departments refer to a Double 5*, which means they have received the top rating twice running).

The TQA (Teaching Quality Assessment) last took place in 1998. We continue to use it here as shorthand for government measures of teaching quality and student support. Reports on teaching quality are currently carried out by the QAA (Quality Assurance Agency). Systems for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland vary and subject specific ratings are not always available.

Try www.ResearchTogether.com

Unless you need to gain 'ordinary residence' status then you might as well try to get a PhD first. However working in industry for a few years won't harm your chances unless the job isn't in research.

The department of Biomolecular Sciences at UMIST received an RAE rating of 5 in the last two Research Assesment Exercises. This means its up about as good as it gets - only a 5* rating is better.

The department of Biomolecular Sciences at UMIST received an RAE rating of 5 in the last two Research Assesment Exercises. This means it's about as good as it gets - only a 5* rating is better.

An MRes is a Masters degree which trains students for a career in research and is often a precursur to a PhD (although unlike an MPhil the student must complete the MRes before applying all over again for a PhD place).

You're not too late to get a funded studentship. New projects are being added to FindAPhD every day. Studentship funding is decided at different times of year, meaning that new projects are still being announced. Keep looking and keep applying. Although things do get much quieter in June, as soon as peoples degree results come out there's a whole bunch of supervisors who find the promising young student they appointed didn't get a 2(i) and they need a replacement quickly.

If you qualify for a UK research council studentship (see our Funding section), then you might as well go straight for a PhD. If you do not qualify, then working in the UK for three years will give you a status of 'ordinarily resident', which will mean that you are eligable for a UK research council studentship. Most industry related PhD schemes (eg CASE studentships) work by placing a student in an industrial environment for part of their PhD, rather than taking an industrial scientist and linking them up with a university. The Teaching Company Scheme has now been replaced by Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP). KTPs allow companies to use the research expertise of universities (including their students) to futher their research and development goals, but they are not really a route to a PhD.

Your best bet is probably the Association of Commonwealth Universities. However, relative to the UK, South Africa is a not a wealthy country and money for education tends to be directed towards South Africans. The South African Department of Education maintains a spreadsheet of funding opportunities which you can access via this link.