Need a bursary? Universities and businesses have never been so generous

There is, they say, no such thing as a free lunch. But a quick look at the many postgraduate bursaries on offer might make you doubt it.

In a crowded graduate market, postgraduate study is beginning to look like a necessary first step for the ambitious and passionate. But how can graduates, lumbered with average debts of more than £15,000, pay their way?

Fortunately, more and more universities are offering scholarships and means-tested bursaries. This year, more than a dozen universities are offering hundreds of new awards. If you know what you want to study and where, it is easy to find out about bursaries. It is just a matter of phoning, and some universities, such as Nottingham and Durham, even have easy-to-use websites devoted to finding supplementary funding.

Shopping around is more difficult, but there are some seriously good offers to be found. Even if you can afford the fees, the bursaries a university proposes do tell you something about the place.

Traditionally, the most generous postgraduate scholarships have been paid for by business through milk-round recruitment of the best graduates, who are then signed up to firms and given valuable postgraduate training in law, finance and accountancy.

There are also bursaries beyond the milk-round. This year, Deutsche Bank is funding 10 new full-fees scholarships worth more than £17,000 each to the London School of Economics' (LSE) school of finance for students from developing countries. Maersk Logistics is sponsoring an £8,000 scholarship on Cranfield School of Management's MSc in Logistics and Supply Chain Management. And the City law firm Denton Wilde Sapte is offering a £1,000 bursary for a student at Birkbeck, University of London's Stratford campus to strengthen its links with the East End community on the firm's doorstep.

Some scholarships come with strings attached. Cranfield scholars will be expected to do their thesis at Maersk Logistics – a perk or a drag, depending on the student. For others, it is part of business's corporate social-responsibility agenda. Big banks and top graduates demand that businesses be seen to be giving something back, explains James Linforth, a partner in banking and finance at Denton Wilde Sapte, who founded the firm's pro bono committee. "It's good in itself," he says. "And it's good for business."

The same could be said for universities themselves. Scholarships for the brightest raise the bar. "Our raison d'être is to get the best people, no matter where they come from," says Warwick Smith, spokesperson for the LSE. Some universities fund scholarships themselves. The University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), for example, offers a Gilbertson Excellence Scholarship worth £3,300 to graduates with first-class honours degrees gained this year.

"We hope that this will motivate our students to aim higher and continue their studies with us," says Patrick McGhee, UCLan's deputy vice-chancellor, of the new scholarships. Scholars will be expected to spend an hour a week encouraging undergraduates to follow in their footsteps.

The University of Hull is expanding its academic scholarships from half-a-dozen last year to 30 this year, to celebrate its 80th anniversary, part of a broader strategy of expanding research. "Hull University is a member of an emergent research-led teaching élite of universities," says Professor Barry Winn, pro-vice- chancellor for research and enterprise. "Through our scholarships, we continue to develop and support an active research community."

Perhaps, but anyone who remembers the joke in Blackadder Goes Forth about the great universities of England – Oxford, Cambridge and Hull – may suspect that offering scholarships is a canny way of beefing up research prestige and the graduate body.

Other universities try to encourage postgraduate take-up with means-tested bursaries. Bradford offers £500, for example, and the University of Teesside offers students on taught postgraduate courses a non-means-tested £2,400, either against fees or as £50 a week for 48 weeks.

And some universities have brought in loyalty schemes. At the University of Lincoln, graduates get £1,000 off postgraduate study if they stay on at the university. At the University of Liverpool, graduates going straight on to postgraduate study are eligible for a means-tested £1,500 bursary, and 10 students will be awarded a £10,000 means-tested Outstanding Student Award if they achieved a First this year.

Bursaries are also used to attract students to areas in which the universities want to develop. Leeds, for example, is offering two new £1,500 scholarships this year to the Institute of Medieval Studies. Recipients will have to work half a day a week on the institute's website and newsletter.

King's College London (KCL) is offering 19 new Innovation Bursaries worth £2,500 for Masters courses starting this year, from an MRes in molecular biophysics to an MA in terrorism and security. "The bursaries are designed to encourage recruitment," says KCL spokesperson Melanie Gardner.

Universities that have an eye on the international market are offering bursaries that will numb some of the pain of international fees, in effect giving discount places. The University of Salford is offering 500 new scholarships for international students. Its International Excellence Scholarships and South Asia Bursaries are worth £2,000 and £1,000 each, respectively. Kingston University, in south-west London, will be offering 48 postgraduate international scholarships for 2008/9, worth £3,000 each.

And Liverpool Hope University has two new scholarships: an unlimited number of Overseas Scholarships and five International Postgraduate Scholarships. Overseas Scholarships are worth £1,000 a year and are open to students who achieved top grades in their degree. International Postgraduate Scholarships, for taught postgraduate programmes, are worth half of the university's fees.

All of which are, indeed, good in themselves and good for business.

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