I first became aware of the many prizes, scholarships, and bursaries offered by the University of Sydney while sitting in a third-year mandatory History seminar. At the end of our hour together, my professor quickly diverted to a PowerPoint slide about the department’s prize for outstanding work in our unit. He encouraged us to apply, making the pertinent observation that “very few students ever do”.
That was the first and last time I have thought about this prize until now, almost a year on. Not only was I completely unaware that it existed before completing this unit at the tail-end of my degree, but I clearly forgot about it the moment I left the lecture theatre. My peers, all in desperate need of the prize money amidst the ongoing cost of living crisis, have been similarly left completing their studies in the dark.
So there remains a large fountain of untapped wealth on our campus, a shared pool supposedly built for students but which never seems to flow to them. The water is murky, veiling where these funds come from and how we might access them. Yet one crystal-clear question remains: where does this money go if no one uses it?
As it turns out, no one seems to know — and they didn’t want to talk to me about it.
The Money On The Table
It is best to start at the shallow end, where it is easier to see and everyone knows how to navigate. The University awards over 600 academic prizes annually, each valued at $1,000 or more. These prizes were established in 2007 “to recognise exemplary undergraduate students”, and are selected internally by each Faculty’s Board of Examiners. While students recognised by their faculty are notified automatically, those hoping to claim one of the eight Literary Prizes for poems, plays and essays valued up to $10,000 must apply themselves.
In addition to the $8,500 scholarships offered for low socio-economic domestic undergraduate students and the 21 scholarships available for international students completing Bachelors and Honours degrees, a host of funds and bursaries are also available as a subset of the aforementioned Literary Prizes. While they are only available to students at the Conservatorium of Music, the value, open, and close dates of these prizes remain unlisted at the time of this article’s publication.
The University’s Academic Board’s Scholarships and Student Recognition Awards Policy, first introduced in 2016 and most recently amended in May of last year, attempts to rectify this obscurity. This Policy details how student recognition awards should be established, managed, marketed, and reviewed. Section 2.7 is of particular interest, stipulating that student recognition awards may be funded by “any, or a mixture, of donated funds, contractually provided funds (including sponsorships), government funding schemes or internal University funds.”
Yet this policy fails to provide any specific details about these funds’ origins, longevity and ethics By stating that this money could come from anywhere, the Academic Board has said essentially nothing. Using this information, there appears to be more than $700,000 available to students each year in the form of academic prize money. This does not include funds accessed through bursaries and scholarships, which fluctuate regularly.
All The Funds You Can’t See
At first glance, the University’s many Heads of School, Chairs and Program Directors appear to be the most knowledgeable people to contact about the allocation of their faculties’ funds. Yet of the twenty whom I contacted, only two academics provided any clarity.
One professor in an Arts faculty told me that “as far as scholarship funds and research support etc goes, generally the funds that are available in one year get rolled over to the next if not taken up, so they are still available… it just means we will have more funds to give out next year.” As a result, academic staff “know what happens to the unspent balances” of those “scholarships and prizes that have a financial code” related to their faculty.
But crucially, they also noted that “there is a communication issue between the scholarships office, us [university staff] and students. They often open up scholarships for applications with a limited window of time, and fail to tell anyone.”
This is because some bursaries have been “taken over by the Scholarships office and we lose control at that point — including of what happens to unspent funding. We have no idea because we can’t see the accounts.” Many academics have subsequently been left wondering “why the Scholarships office has taken over some of these in the past year.”
It seems that the gap between these funds and students has widened quickly and only recently, extending to staff and university management alike. It was at this point that I was intercepted by a University spokesperson, who informed me in a statement that scholarships “exist thanks to the generosity of our donors. Most philanthropic support is strictly managed under legally binding agreements, rather than discretionary funding, meaning gifts must be used in accordance with the donor’s wishes and can’t be redirected to other causes.”
They confirmed that scholarships “established by donors which aren’t able to be spent accumulate, so that additional scholarships can be awarded the following semester or year”. Yet in contrast with the experiences of academics, the spokesperson also noted that “faculties have discretion to allocate operating funds towards scholarships aligned to their individual strategic objectives. Faculties also have delegate responsibilities for the use of donor funds as per the terms and conditions of the deed.”
I left the email thread knowing no more about the total sum, origins and endpoints of these funds than when I started it. As the University spokesperson reminded me, universities are “not-for-profit institutions; every cent we receive is directed back into teaching, student support, research, technology and physical infrastructure.” So why was no one able to provide the details necessary to prove this?
The Dalyell Dilemma
One further complication is the allocation of funds to members of the Dalyell Scholars stream. Currently, a Dalyell Global Mobility scholarship of $2,000 is available to students enrolled in this stream who wish to partake in a Faculty-led program worth at least six credit points, or a semester exchange worth 24 credit points. Students must apply for these programs, and funds are centrally administered through Sydney Student and the Dalyell Subcommittee of the Scholarships Office.
It is worth noting that students not enrolled in the Dalyell program are still able to access $1,500 in the Vice Chancellor’s Global Mobility scholarship.
Akin to the handling of other scholarships and prizes, the same University spokesperson told me that “where the allocation exceeds demand in any one year (as it did, for example, during the pandemic) the funds are used for other areas within the scholarships portfolio. Similarly where demand exceeds the amount budgeted additional funds are sourced from other areas.”
However, when I spoke to another Economics academic at the University, they clarified that “when students do not get a chance to pursue an overseas enrichment experience and they are in their last year of their degree, they can use those funds for a domestic enrichment activity such as attending a conference, research, or in-country experience.” But in their position, they can only provide “a quality control check to make sure that the activity will enrich students’ academic experience”.
This academic also pointed out that it is difficult to determine the number of Dalyell students at the beginning of each academic year because high-performing individuals can join the stream at any time. This “would probably involve some uncertainty in the funds required for every cohort”, potentially fuelling further miscommunication between staff and students.
Your Hard-Earned Cash
Two conclusions are clear despite the University’s lack of transparency: that unclaimed funds are continuously recycled across various bursaries, scholarships, and prizes, but that no one knows where or how. Any control that academics once had has now been relinquished to University management, along with the hope of finding out who has donated this money and where they got it in the first place.
There is only one thing left to do — apply for every piece of funding that you can. At least then we will know where it has gone.
