FROM Newsbeat @bbc
Stormzy has announced that he will fund two black British students to go to the University of Cambridge.
The Stormzy Scholarship will pay for tuition fees and provide a maintenance grant for up to four years of an undergraduate course.
The rapper says: “It’s so important for black students, especially, to be aware that it can 100% be an option to attend a university of this calibre.”
The rapper will fund two students this year and two in 2019.
Explaining why he set up the scholarship, Stormzy tells Radio 1 Newsbeat: “In school and college I had the ability and was almost destined to go to one of the top universities.
“But that didn’t happen for myself… so hopefully there’s another young black student out there that can have that opportunity through my scholarship.”
He adds: “I always said that there’s a whole bunch of academically brilliant, excellent students who also need an incentive.”
Cambridge has been criticised for not admitting many pupils from a black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) background.
In June, the university asked for help from schools and parents to increase the number of black British students it enrols.
It was after the Financial Times found that some Cambridge colleges didn’t take in any black students from 2012 to 2016.
The university says that it admitted 58 black students on to undergraduate courses in 2017.
“We’re going to have young black students who are academically brilliant and smashing it, and they should just have that opportunity to walk into a university like Cambridge,” says Stormzy.
