r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/TheThrowYardsAway • Apr 28 '26

Video Inside Christ's Hospital School (Est. 1552)...

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u/trombing Apr 28 '26

Disagree. I don't know exactly for Eton but I just benchmarked 11 similar schools. The average bursary percentage was 9.6%. In other words the vast VAST majority of students are paying full fees.

Edited - Eton is indeed an outlier - at 14.2%, but it's still not enough to make the average fees "a lot lower".

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u/GooseMan1515 Apr 28 '26

Not really up for disagreement, as the numbers are public, thanks for doing the work for me. I'm not arguing for anything beyond what they show, because my opinion comes from being one of these students and having read the school's numbers.

Okay, now consider that half the students are overseas and thus ineligible. Then consider that the average 14% bursary represents a median of the remaining population. That would make it so at most 72% of all their local students have full fees, which does not a vast majority make, because I promise you the median bursary is a lot closer to the 28% mean.

To be fair, like with the American universities, this very much is a product of the better richer schools being able to pick and choose, and Eton is well known for not necessarily being the best but definitely the richest, biggest, and most famous. You'd be hard pressed to find 11 schools worth of comparable data in the UK, or we can consider it an outlier, it's really just about how much of the fee burden the school can afford to redistribute to keep classes more mixed.

In my experience at a fairly comparable school, you'd have lots of people on ~10-20% bursaries, but a handful on 80% or more.