UK education options for Sub-Degree Graduates

For bachelor’s degree graduates, who fall short of the English or academic requirements of their desired master’s degrees, doing a Pre-Master’s can help bridge the gap. For Associate Degree and Higher Diploma graduates who have good grades and certain work experience, doing a Pre-Master’s will enable them to enter a master’s degree, skipping the undergraduate qualification.

As requirements are not standardised, applications for top-up degrees are normally processed on a case-by-case basis. The more similar your sub-degree are to the top-up programme, the shorter you are required to study. Experience tells that students with good results in their sub-degree can normally progress to year 2, apart from the more professional courses such as accounting and law.

Apart from universities, a number of colleges also run undergraduate programmes and accept students into top-up degrees. Although the top-up degrees are taught at colleges, the qualification is still awarded by universities. It usually takes 1 to 1.5 years to complete a top-up programme in colleges which is shorter than doing similar programmes in universities.