Alternative Routes to Earning a Degree

Earning a degree is widely held up as the pinnacle of achievement in education. Bachelor’s degrees have always been highly respected qualifications. But at a time when all young people have to now remain in compulsory education up to the age of 18, continuing your studies to take a degree has arguably taken on even greater significance.

Perhaps now more than ever, a degree makes you stand out from the crowd when it comes to applying for jobs and getting ahead in your career. It also opens the door to postgraduate study at masters level and beyond, when you can establish yourself as a specialist in your field or pursue a career in academia itself.

It’s little surprise, therefore, that so many people (and not just school leavers) aspire to getting a degree. But the well-trodden route to doing so R three years of full-time study at a university R is not for everyone.

There are many reasons why that might be the case. You might not have obtained the A-Level grades you wanted to get on the degree course of your choice. For many older people looking to return to study later in life, they may not have taken A-Levels at all.

For others, the commitment of signing up for a three-year course in one go R both time-wise and financially R is too much. If you are in work and have a family to look after, it might be impossible for you to study full-time. Part time degree courses can take five or six years to complete. That might seem like too much to take on. You might prefer to break it down into smaller chunks and see how you progress.

None of these things should be reasons to bar people who are determined to improve their skills and knowledge and achieve at a high level from taking a degree. And nor are they. Because while the three years full time study route remains the most popular option for earning a degree, there are plenty of alternatives to suit people in a wide range of different circumstances. Here are the main ones you should know about.

‘Top Up’ From Another Qualification

If you’re unsure about committing to a full bachelor’s degree right from the start, no problem. You don’t have to. The way the UK qualification framework works, you can build towards a degree in smaller steps.

The framework ranks qualifications at different ‘levels’ which indicate the relative level of challenge and the time it typically takes to complete a course. Bachelor’s degrees are ranked at Level 6, A-Levels (and other final year school age qualifications) at Level 3. So there’s a significant gap.

In that gap, you find a whole host of higher education (HE) qualifications at Levels 4 and 5 R Higher National Certificates (HNCs) and Certificates of Higher Education (CertHEs) at the former, Higher National Diplomas (HNDs), Diplomas of Higher Education (DipHEs) and Foundation Degrees at Level 5.

Once you get past Level 3, each subsequent level indicates an extra year of full-time higher education study. So a Level 4 HNC or CertHE takes a year to complete, a Level 5 HND or Foundation Degree two years, and then a Level 6 bachelor’s degree three years.

If you wish, you can use this system to work your way up through the qualification levels a step at a time. At each stage, you get a recognised qualification in its own right, and you have the choice to either jump off then or carry on up another level.

A popular route is for people to take a HND or a foundation degree, and then choose a one-year top-up degree to convert their Level 5 qualification into a bachelor’s degree. There are a number of benefits to this. One is the fact that foundation degrees and, even more so, HNDs are very much vocational in focus. Rather than the academic focus of a bachelor’s degree course, you can spend two years gaining knowledge, skills and experience directly relevant to your chosen career.

HNDs even place a lot of emphasis on work-based learning, ideal for gaining a qualification as you work. When you qualify with your HND, you might decide that you have reached the level you want to pursue your career ambitions, and have a well-respected qualification to prove the level you have achieved. But, with a top-up degree, you still have the option of converting that into a bachelor’s degree R and at any stage in your career going forward R to take your expertise to the next level again.

Foundation Year Routes

Not to be confused with foundation degrees, foundation year routes offer a means of pursuing a conventional degree course to people who might not have the previous qualifications required to enrol on the course of their choice. Equally, foundation years are popular with international students who come to the UK to study but who speak English as a second language.

Rather than the ‘stepping stone’ approach, a foundation year route means committing to an extra year of study towards a degree, so four years in total. The additional year R the foundation year taken before the degree course proper starts R is used to bring people up to speed with the academic skills needed to successfully complete a bachelor’s course. In the case of international students, that includes supporting them in studying in a second language.

Degree Apprenticeships

One of the newest routes to obtaining a degree-level qualification is a degree apprenticeship. Like all apprenticeships, these programmes are employment-based. You work as you learn, and you are paid for the privilege. This is ideal if your main aim in studying is to pursue your career, as all the costs are paid by your employer.

In that sense, degree apprenticeships are extensions of companies’ own internal training and development schemes. The benefit for businesses is that they get to nurture talent internally, focusing on the skills and abilities that make the biggest difference to them. Because they are pitched at a high level, degree apprenticeships are ideal for developing people for senior roles in an organisation, and therefore suit people who have aspirations of a long career with a single employer.