The University Grants Commission (UGC) on July 31 issued circulars inviting aspiring faculties of public universities and other Bangladeshi nationals to submit applications, within September 15 and 18 respectively for Commonwealth Scholarship 2025-26, with (un)conditional offer letters from United Kingdom universities for admission in September/October 2025 session.
Faculties have found the requirements of submitting conditional offer letters or ones with the condition "related to Language Proficiency or Finance" within the aforesaid deadline 'unfair' and 'impractical' as it was apparently impossible to receive (un)conditional offer letters from UK universities by the UGC deadline.
Most of the top UK universities open the application process in the beginning of September 2024 and their application deadlines end by the first week of January-March 2025.
Offers are usually made 8-10 weeks after the application deadlines. That is, applicants of the 2025-26 session may not receive offer letters before December at the earliest. M universities will start making offers around March or April 2025 for the 2025-26 session.
Browsing websites of some top UK universities, this correspondent found that most of the universities have application deadlines as late as March 2025 or even later.
The University of Oxford has set March 4, 2025 as its final application deadline for entry into the DPhil in Education programme in 2025-26.
The final application deadlines for some programmes at the University of Cambridge, and Edinburgh are February 25, 2025 and March 10, 2025 respectively.
The universities that have a rolling admission process suggest submitting admission applications at least three months before the course starts. In most of these cases, it is not possible for any applicant to obtain offer letters by the deadline set by the UGC.
On condition of anonymity, one faculty from the University of Dhaka said, "UGC's requirement of submitting unconditional offer letters with the application form by September 15 or 18 is misleading. It's unfair and impractical. Because nobody can collect an (un)conditional offer letter from the UK universities by September 15 or 18 if he/she is a fresh applicant for the 2025-26 session."
Sharing his previous experience, another DU teacher said, "I was nominated by the UGC for the Commonwealth Scholarship for the 2022-23 session, but there was no such requirement of an (un)conditional offer letter with the application."
He added, "In the final application form of the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission (CSC), applicants are asked to mention three preferred institutions. No offer letters or even IELTS scores are required to complete the CSC application form. Successful applicants can submit these documents after the final funding decisions are made by the CSC. So why is the UGC creating these bars for the applicants?"
When asked who would be nominated by the UGC for the Commonwealth Scholarship for the 2025-26 session if nobody can collect an offer letter within the period, he explained, "Maybe, those who obtained offer letters last year but could not get any funds and somehow managed to defer their offers from last year to the next year will mostly be nominated for the scholarships."
He added, "Does it mean that the Commonwealth Scholarship 2025 has been announced for those who got offers for the 2024-25 session but could somehow defer their offers owing to their failure to manage funds? This is outrageous! This is unfair!"
"This requirement actually excludes the fresh applicants from the application process. This is a bitter irony that the UGC requirement tends to eliminate those very applicants for whom the scholarship is actually intended. And this is extremely discriminatory and unfair," the teacher observed.
UGC Member Prof Mohammad Tanzimuddin Khan said the commission had already sent the list of the nominated scholarship aspirants to the CSC.
"The UGC added the requirements to the circulars in light with the CSC instructions. We included no fresh requirement," said Prof Tanzim, adding that the CSC had the demand of offer letters.
Browsing the website of the CSC, this correspondent did not find the requirement of offer letter as prerequisite to apply for the scholarship.
It, however, mentioned that each nominator oversees its own selection process and may have additional eligibility criteria.
