Five questions to answer before you enrol anywhere
This page is a worksheet, not an argument. The rest of this site argues — twelve situations with a verdict on each, and six cheaper things for the cases where the verdict is no. This page assumes you are past all of that and close to paying someone. Before you do, answer five questions in writing. Not in your head — in writing. An answer you cannot put on paper is an answer you do not yet have, and every one of these five has a way of feeling answered while remaining blank.
Copy the five headings into a note, or print this page. The worksheet works on any programme at any institution — an MBA, a diploma, a certificate, anything with a fee and a duration attached.
1 · What exactly will you hold at the end — and who awards it?
Write the full name of the award as it will appear on the certificate, and the name of the body that will appear above it. These are two separate facts, and the second is the one people skip. A university degree and an institute diploma are different instruments that satisfy different rules; neither is a lesser thing in itself, but paying for one while needing the other is the most expensive mistake in distance education. Our recognition guide walks through how to verify what you are told. If a brochure is vague about who awards what, treat the vagueness itself as your answer, and go and ask until the vagueness resolves.
2 · Whose rule must it satisfy — quoted, not remembered?
Somewhere there is a reader: an HR policy that gates a band, a recruitment notification, a committee matrix, an admission requirement. Find the sentence that reader will apply and copy it onto the worksheet word for word. Paraphrase is where money dies — “postgraduate qualification” and “postgraduate degree” look interchangeable in memory and are worlds apart in effect. If you search and no such sentence exists anywhere in your life, stop here: you may be in one of the situations where our honest verdict is to spend far less, or nothing at all. The five-question route through this site settles that in twenty minutes.
3 · What is the all-in figure, as one written number?
Not the headline fee — the total. Registration, every semester or yearly instalment, each examination cycle including the possibility of appearing again, project submission, and the final document itself. The fees guide lists the components worth hunting for. Add them into a single figure in your own handwriting. If the components refuse to add up — if something is “as applicable” or “at the time of” — ask the institution to state the total in writing before any money moves. A body that cannot name its own total is telling you something useful about the two years ahead.
4 · Where will the hours come from — named, not hoped?
Write down the actual slots: which evenings, which weekend hours, and whose cooperation each one depends on. “I will find the time” is the sentence that precedes most abandoned enrolments. We have taken the cost of studying while working full-time apart on its own page; the short version is that the fee is the smaller purchase and the diary is the larger one, and only one of the two is refundable in any sense at all.
5 · If you stop at the halfway mark, what are you left holding?
More programmes are abandoned than any prospectus admits, so plan for the possibility on paper while it is still hypothetical. Three sub-answers belong here: what the institution certifies after the first year, how long a paused registration stays alive, and what re-entry costs after a gap. A programme that leaves you with nothing at the midpoint is not automatically wrong — but you should enrol knowing it, because the people most likely to need a pause are exactly the working, family-carrying people this site is written for.
Scoring the sheet
Five written answers: enrol, and keep the sheet — the quoted rule under question two has a way of needing to be re-read two years later, when the certificate arrives and meets its reader. Any blank: the blank is your next task, not the enrolment. The worksheet has no pass mark beyond that, and it is deliberately indifferent to which institution you were about to pay. Institutions that survive all five questions exist at several very different price points, which is precisely why the questions come before the shortlist and not after it.