You don't have to be potentially professional standard to get an organ scholarship at Oxford or Cambridge (I was involved with various college choirs in both places from 1980 till a decade or so ago and still have some contact with some of them, as well as knowing a lot of former organ scholars). Just about all of them have the ARCO diploma but only a minority have the FRCO while they are at university. You need to know which college they were at as some rank far above others. Anyone who was organ scholar at somewhere like King's College Cambridge or Christ Church, Oxford ought to be good enough to get a cathedral job later on; but former organ scholars at some of the less musically prestigious colleges (I would count Balliol among these) are likely to find a career doing something other than playing the organ, though possibly still within music such as teaching or publishing. Cambridge organ scholarships are more sought after than Oxford ones in general, because Cambridge colleges put more money into their music and this results in better instruments to play on and more foreign tours, recordings, broadcasts etc. Virginia Knight Personal homepage: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/~ggvhk/virginia.html