I looked it up and I'm seeing that it still costs about 6k pounds or less per year. Is there a program designed to provide easy/guaranteed credit to PhD students?
To me it seems really bizarre to charge this amount because it only seems enough to keep out poor or financially unstable people (for the UK), without conferring much financial benefit to the university.
Most students never see this fee, because they receive funding that pays it directly as well as paying them a stipend.
There are various funders - the largest is the government (via Research Councils UK), but universities also provide a limited number of scholarships, as do charities like Cancer research UK or the Welcome Trust.
The tuition fees are limited by what the funding agencies are willing to pay: e.g. for 2017/18, the EPSRC has an 'indicative fee level' of £4,195 (and a national mimum stipend of £14,553 paid to the student) [1].
> Is there a program designed to provide easy/guaranteed credit to PhD students?
Not really: banks do not consider the stipend to be a salary, so when assesing loans treat PhD students as if they had no income at all.
This is about what I figured. In the US PhD programs have a nominal cost but it's almost always waived. In effect graduate students usually make about $20k/year
To me it seems really bizarre to charge this amount because it only seems enough to keep out poor or financially unstable people (for the UK), without conferring much financial benefit to the university.