A law programme cannot be great if only the privileged can participate.
At UCT Law we seek to attract students who are academically talented and who bring to the classroom a diversity of personal and professional experiences and perspectives, regardless of their ability to fund their studies.
While South Africa’s National Student Financial Assistance Scheme (NSFAS) began funding full-cost tuition in 2018 for the poorest students, this left a large group of LLB students who did not qualify for NSFAS, but who had a pressing need for financial support. In addition, the NSFAS scheme withdrew all funding support for graduate LLB students (ie. those LLB students with an undergraduate degree), and NSFAS now only funds the 4-year LLB degree.
Your support for the Scholarship Programme can ensure that our eager law students can qualify with their LLB and and contribute professionally to the growth of the field of Law.
Below: Advocate Fumisa Ngqele | LLB Class of 2016
Our Scholarship programme, though, is not just for our LLB students.
With excellence in Faculty expertise and facilities, we attract postgraduate students from across the world. UCT Law’s School for Advanced Legal Studies has become a destination hub for postgraduate studies in Law – for coursework programmes and degrees by research.
Postgraduate studies are underfunded in South Africa, with very little funding available for Masters students enrolled in coursework programmes. Research degrees in Law are similarly underfunded. It is critical that we are able to attract top students into these postgraduate programmes as our key route to building research expertise amongst young legal scholars, and to contributing to developing the field of Law and of legal practice.
Currently the Scholarship programme invests about R2.5million each year on scholarship support for tuition for undergraduate and postgraduate study.
With your support we can do better. And more students can achieve their professional dream at UCT Law!
