No I think you were right; PhD acceptance rates are fairly low in the UK, including for self-funded. I think rewt is confused with Master's courses. My programme accepts only 36% of applications. I think you are correct that universities prefer full-time PhD students because completion rates are much higher and full-time candidates are also more present and easier to manage/schedule. I've e-mailed my supervisor to see what he thinks; I told him honestly my intentions to finish within four years to save on fees and allow some employment insurance with Universal Credit. I'm unsure what he'll say since he's one of the best scholars in my field and always very busy so he may prefer full-time. Thanks for your replies.

Thanks for replying, PsychologicalDr, I'm really glad to hear someone else is doing this. I am thinking of just e-mailing my supervisor and being honest like you were. When you told them about the cheaper fees and pointed them to the regulations, what did they say in reply? And have you had to apply for early progression reveiws? In my booklet there is a rough timetable of reviews that you have to pass and they are different for full and part-time candidates.

And I agree about self-funding! I've had serious health issues for the past two years forcing me to repeatedly delay the PhD. I'm finally healthy again and there's no way I'm delaying for a third year. My plan is the same as yours, i.e. apply for scholarships while a student. Great to hear you were successful.

Which subject area? If you scroll to the bottom there appears to be one scholarship still open for Health Faculties or Faculty of Natural & Mathematical Sciences:

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/funding-opportunities/doctoral-research-opportunities/international-scholarships

I hadn't heard about AHRC funding being more difficult in the second year but that does make sense, alas. There are two departmental scholarships I can apply for which my supervisor has encouraged, so fingers crossed.

That's true for Master's (which have much higher fees) but certainly not for PhDs. The fees are too low and the difficulty is too high for PhDs to act as cash cows. The application process is far more rigorous because universities are wary of non-completion rates. A strong proposal and academic record is necessary, regardless of whether you can pay the fees. Many PhD acceptance rates can be found via FOI requests on WhatDoTheyKnow, e.g. mine is 36%. All sorts of different subjects can be found, e.g. a PhD in Law at Queen Mary's has an acceptance rate of 16% (300 applications, 50 offers). Bristol has a wide range from very low rates of 5-10% with typically high numbers of applicants (economics, management, physics, computer science, engineering) to around 25-40% for philosophy, English, sociology, chemistry, etc. to very high rates but always in low numbers, e.g. classics (20 applicants) or French/Italian (<5 applicants). I suspect Bristol's average is <30%. As you go down the university rankings it probably gets higher, but I doubt any university in the Top 40 has an average above 50%, and the lower ranked universities offer a very limited range of PhD programmes anyway.

Thanks rewt. I don't think use of facilities/supervision will be a problem since I'm a literature student. I'll rarely be on campus and I prefer working on my own. But I did some more digging and I think you're right that submitting at 36 months might be inconvenient. There are three quite in-depth progression reviews (an initital first-year one, then an MPhil to PhD confirmation, and then a final one before submission), which occur according to approximate timetables for full-time and part-time. I would have to apply each time for an early review then finally for early submission, and I suspect they may just force me to switch to full-time at some point. But then again, why would they say that the minimum period is 36 months if they don't in fact allow it? I wonder what they would say if I just told them my intention to do it part-time but with the hope of finishing within 4 years?

Something else I just thought of is that part-time keeps open the option of Universal Credit in case I lose my part-time job, which I am worried about because my employer was hit hard by the lockdowns and has already made cuts.

To make matters more complicated, I'm planning to apply to AHRC next year (I missed the deadline this year due to illness) and I'm concerned that being part-time would look worse because of the higher incompletion rate.

Hello everyone. I was due to start a full-time, self-funded PhD in October but as I was looking through the regulations I noticed the minimum period for part-time completion is only 3 years (36 months). Full-time fees are £4,500/year and part-time are half that so I'd save £6,750 across 3 years, or £9000 if it happened to take 4 years. Has anyone done this? Are there any disadvantages to registering as part-time while actually studying full-time?

Thanks for any advice,
Hannah.