Stormzy To Support Two Black Students A Year At Cambridge University.

Grime artist Stormzy has announced that he will personally fund 2 scholarship places for black students at Cambridge University. He will personally pay the students’ tuition fees as well as a maintenance grant for up to four years of an undergraduate course. Stormzy said: 

‘There are so many young black kids all over the country who have the level of academic excellence to study at a university such as Cambridge - however we are still under represented at leading universities. We, as a minority, have so many examples of black students who have excelled at every level of education throughout the years. I hope this scholarship serves as a small reminder that if young black students wish to study at one of the best universities in the world, then the opportunity is yours for the taking - and if funding is one of the barriers, then we can work towards breaking that barrier down.’

Applications close at the end of the month. In June it was revealed that some Cambridge universities admitted no or accepted just one per year between 2012 and 2016.

Last year 58 black students came up to Cambridge, a university with 19,555 students. Cambridge had in the last fiscal budget of 2016-2017, a budget of £1.714bn and an endowment of £4.9bn. The question are posing is, with so much money in budgets, endowments and property, why has it taken a 25 year old grime artist to be the first person to develop this initiative and why could Cambridge University not have created these opportunities internally?