Why British students are flocking to America

Forget Oxbridge. The cream of Britain’s undergraduates are being seduced by North American universities. Where does this leave our own stuffy, underfunded institutions?
Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe

Imagine a dinner party in west London. The wine is flowing and so is the conversation. A successful baby-boomer father turns to the woman on his left and boasts: “Chloe’s at Oxford, you know.” But she merely raises an eyebrow. Oxbridge is so common these days. “Henry’s at Yale,” she replies coolly. In the silence that follows the envy is palpable as the man, who is used to feeling superior, realises he’s missed a trick. This is the nightmare scenario propelling today’s pushy parents to go one step further for their school-leaving children. The bar has been raised. The best British universities no longer carry enough cachet to impress.

At a North American university fair in the towering panelled hall of King’s College School, Wimbledon, one mother hovers protectively over her 16-year-old son and whispers, conspiratorially: “We haven’t told anyone.”

Of course they haven’t: they want to get one up on them. “Our friends have no idea we are considering the States.” Her son stands obediently mute among the din from throngs of kids quizzing delegates at stalls emblazoned with Harvard, Yale, MIT and the rest. Their excitement suggests the secret is out. The higher education to die for is across the pond.

Buoyed by glowing feedback from students already in America, the “Obama effect” and international recruitment efforts by American universities, British students are increasingly badgering their teachers for information about American degrees. “I realised it was an important area of the boys’ lives and I didn’t know enough,” says Andrew Halls, King’s energetic headmaster.
Related Links

* Middle class tighten grip on top universities

A male member of the audience leans close. “The parents here are very upwardly mobile. Very,” he says, catching my gaze and widening his eyes dramatically before recoiling as if he’d said nothing at all. But a brief scan of the crowd reveals only a few fathers’ heads canopying above the crowd and an occasional stylish mother. Surely this is helicopter parent utopia — where are the rest? “We didn’t invite them,” says Halls; the idea was for the students to find out for themselves. One American delegate reveals why: “I frequently meet with a student and the parent does all the talking and the child stands there like a ventriloquist’s dummy. One wanted to move into her daughter’s dorm room.”

When I was at school, American universities weren’t on the radar. My US stint in 1996 was my headmistress’s pioneering attempt to open us up to study abroad. I was plucked from my sixth-form biology class and whisked off to a genetics lab perched on Long Island’s coastline an hour’s drive from New York. In the entire year there I met only one Brit my age on campus. Nowadays, Jack Wills-clad exports are guaranteed sightings on any top American university campus. Right now, there are 4,352 undergraduates from the UK out there, 3% up on the previous academic year, and - thanks in part to a few high-profile recruits like the Harry Potter actress Emma Watson, who snubbed Cambridge for the liberal Brown University in Rhode Island - top US and Canadian universities are in vogue.

“People automatically think I’m so intelligent,” says Londoner Charlotte Beecham. “They love the accent.” The ferociously hip 21-year-old, drawn to the artsy glamour of New York University’s Greenwich Village campus in Manhattan, is unabashed about its lure.

“It’s the money,” she says. “The facilities are insane. In lectures, every seat has a pop-out map book, and my campus has a NYU Starbucks and flags everywhere, and basketball teams and everyone is really enthusiastic, and the library is nine floors and open 24 hours.”

With just a few UK students among more than 21,000 undergraduates, it takes a gutsy soul to hunker down here. “Some days I feel quite alone, and New York is intimidating from time to time, but you just get on with it.” She has moved on from her old London schoolmates. “They’re jealous,” she shrugs. “I’ve made new friends and tried new places and they are pretty much doing the same things, which I think is quite dull.”

So, who’s applying? “It tends to be a girl who sees herself in the world on a big stage,” says Vicky Tuck, principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ College. “Parents have raised their children to be very aspirational, and the child pursues excellence with an international outlook.” Lisa Montgomery, a private-education consultant specialising in US undergraduate admissions, agrees. “The families tend to shop globally and vacation globally; it’s the same for education.”

But coughing up thousands, over £30,000 a year for the top universities, means many parents like to know precisely what their child has said on their application forms and are furious if they are sidelined. “Universities struggle with the freedom-of-information laws,” says one delegate. “If the student is 18 or over, we can’t give out any information about grades or what is on their forms without written authorisation from the student. You can imagine how that goes.”

Snobbery and oneupmanship aren’t the only reason parents look stateside. At the fair, I chat to a father and his son, a gentle kid who balances on crutches, tucking his crippled leg to one side. “He’s so excited about going,” the father says. “I feel the education is the best.

But,” he glances tenderly at his son, “it comes out top for other reasons too.” Funding for disability access comes easily when there are bulging coffers to raid, and money is something the top American institutions have in excess. Even their state-run universities have plenty to go around. “We are publicly funded as opposed to publicly under-funded,” the University of British Columbia delegate jokes, taking a jibe at what many consider to be the flailing attempt at government support for our own pillars of excellence.

After trawling the rain-soaked, facility-starved UK campuses, entering an American equivalent is like stepping into nirvana for some parents - and the pulling power of these dazzling displays is not lost on those staging them. “I only want the best for my girls,” says Charlotte Beecham’s father, Robert, a private-company director who has lost both his daughters to the States and whose son will soon join them across the pond. “We did a proper survey of what was available in this country, and compared it to the east coast of America. It was all over in five minutes.”

The need to sell their wares has only recently dawned on British universities, which, before hefty tuition fees and global league tables turned applicants into consumers, were happy to stuff hordes of parents into a grotty lecture hall, mumble through a few slides and wave them towards the canteen. In the States, it’s all about one-on-one time with the cash cows, and boy, does it pay off. “The way the faculty members speak to parents over there, the way the school is portrayed, the motivation and encouragement and the sheer chasing of good achievement through honest labour... you just can’t walk away from it,” says Beecham’s awestruck dad.

It may seem unfair to compare America’s well-oiled, heftily endowed recruitment machine, liberally serviced by alumni who pour money back into their alma maters, to our embryonic one — with 2.9% (£252 billion) of GDP spent on higher education, the US can easily entice top students and researchers to star institutions, something that the UK, at 1.3% (£18.3 billion), struggles to do. Nevertheless, education is on an unswervingly global trajectory and what we’ve got is, well, in some cases, embarrassing.

“You can’t go into adult life, especially when there is no job for you, with a £20,000 debt and not care that you had poor teaching,” says Halls, who warned at the conference about “dumbed-down”, “apathetic” teaching at some of the UK’s best institutions. “We all know UK tuition fees are going to go up. Pupils think Oxbridge and Imperial are fantastic, but they quickly hit disillusionment and wonder if, instead of paying £20,000 to go through a broken system, they could pay more - or try to get these surprisingly good bursaries - and study in the States.”

Sceptics, however, believe the “flight to the US” is less about parents wanting to give their child an elite education and more about their saving face when the child doesn’t make the grade for Britain’s golden quintet: Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, UCL and LSE. “There is a perception that getting into some of the UK universities is more difficult,” says Tuck. Particularly for privately educated pupils. “One of the problems with top UK universities is the pressure the government’s been putting on them to widen access,” confides an expert. “There is concern that students at independent schools may not get a fair crack of the whip. Parents are increasingly looking at Harvard, Yale and Princeton and the others so their children can compete educationally on equal terms.”

For many, however, the leap is for more superficial reasons, a point not lost on Wellington’s headmaster, Anthony Seldon. “The vogue at the moment is for America,” he says. “I expect in 10 years’ time they will be talking about Chinese universities. It’s human nature to boast that you or your children have been somewhere, got a bigger car or bigger house or better holidays or your child goes to a better school or university.” Vicky Tuck concurs: “Oxford and Cambridge still occupy a very high-status position but some people regard getting into an American Ivy League university as a more prestigious thing to have done,” she says.

Such comments are supported by an Oxbridge-educated, early-thirties aristocrat who, when asked whether an Ivy League stint is seen in his parents’ circle as something to crow about, admits: “It’s absolutely true. A Harvard degree is a ‘one up’.” This same elitist British crowd are happy to pay whatever it takes to “keep their options open”, notes Lisa Montgomery. “There’s a rise in old-school, Eton-going British families contacting us,” she says.

Social cachet is, however, usually the last thing on the students’ minds. I speak to another hopeful, a honey-blonde 16-year-old with an Identikit mother. The teen has the sophisticated poise of a beauty queen with “destined for California” invisibly etched on her forehead.

So, why does she want to study in America? “It sounds fun?” she says, rolling her oversized eyes at the mother gurning anxiously by her side. “No, darling, that’s not what the lady asked. Why do you want to go?” The ingénue pauses, a slight indent on her brow. “Because it sounds great,” she decides. “The facilities, the parties, the men.”

Ah, the men. She is not alone in finding the brash Abercrombie-and-Fitch-wearing American hunks alluring; the Ivy League alumni are enough to make any girl gibber. In today’s enlightened times, however, the hope of snaffling a future CEO of Goldman Sachs is appealing but not the only path to wealth. As one female British student in her final year at Yale says, “I am here to become a CEO, not marry one.”

Charlotte Beecham baulks at the thought of hooking up with an American boy. “I’ve been really disappointed. I thought, ‘They can’t be worse,’ and I found that the men are so stupid. My new thing is I only aim 27-plus.”

Jasmine Hay, 19, from Walton-on-Thames, is more optimistic. “There are a lot of cute guys here, more than at my friends’ universities in the UK,” she confides from her dorm at Holder Hall on Princeton’s New Jersey campus, 18 months into her stint there. “They seem more confident and outgoing than their UK counterparts.” Saying that, she’s plumped for an Australian/English squeeze. Hay plans to major in chemistry, and volunteers two hours each week to teach local school kids, something she seamlessly slots around her own English, organic chemistry, physics and Spanish classes.

Parents keen to push their kids into higher learning stateside should note the words of Thomas Sprenkle, 29, an American graduate of Brown and Pennsylvania universities: “Even at exclusive colleges, heavy drinking, casual sex and soft drugs are prevalent,” he says. “Penn, Dartmouth and Cornell are Ivies with large ‘Greek scenes’ [undergraduate fraternities and sororities] and Princeton’s eating clubs are legendary for their booze-fuelled parties. Many of America’s liberal arts colleges are in isolated, rural areas where boredom often leads to drinking and casual sex.”

From her New York base, Beecham is non-plussed about the party scene. “In the city it’s very different to the fraternity/sorority scene,” she says. “I’ve taken trips with friends to Harvard and Penn and it is like the movies. People do play weird drinking games.” But not everyone wants to join the Greek scene. “At the time I loved it,” says Alice Howard, 26, a graduate of George Mason, Virginia. “When I met the sororities and found out what it was all about, it was ghastly.

I couldn’t bring myself to do it. At George Mason it was about having matching red sports cars and being cliquey. Watch any stereotypical American movie and it’s like that.”

Another rite of passage for American students is the infamous spring break, where popular Florida and Cayman resorts are taken over by legions of college students from all over the States, becoming “one massive booze-fuelled spree” which, says Sprenkle, “most students treat as a solid weekend of partying”. One alumni from the University of Toronto, who’s snogged “about 20 British girls”, says UK girls are seen as “a bit of a catch” and not remotely well behaved. This is countered, however, by an Ivy alumni who suggests that “British students are more likely to emulate grown-ups in hosting private dinner parties and participating in fancy balls.”

Although most families that send their kids across the Atlantic are ones that can freely splash cash (two-thirds of international undergraduates in America are funded this way), not all can. At Harvard, for example, “needs blind” funding lets kids from families on incomes of up to £33,000 go for free, and even those on up to £93,000 a year pay just £9,000. British families without those resources will do everything within their power to get their children there. “I met Brits in America who were down to their last pennies to give their children the education they never had,” says Robert Beecham. “It’s magnificent.”

David Naylor, a retired dentist from Penarth, near Cardiff, says he would have sold the house to fulfil his son’s dream of going to Harvard. Luckily, his razor-sharp son, Tim, 26, was a sure-fire hit for the university and, thanks to needs-blind funding, the cost to the family was about the same as for Tim’s brother to go to Falmouth University in the UK. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” says fair-haired rugby enthusiast Tim, now in his last year of barrister training in Cardiff with a top-of-the-range-pupilage in the bag. “The first five months were difficult. But I loved it. The study opportunities are out of this world, and the extras, the people that come in, the alumni you meet - incredible.”

He confesses that the move from his Welsh hometown was a wrench. “My grandfather passed away in my first few months and it was tough being so far away.” He also notes the period of adjustment, and of being “lost in translation”. “I found it very difficult socialising at first. Things like getting a pint when you’re 18 in a country where the legal age is 21. Proctors police you to make sure you’re not drinking. When I went back after Christmas a few rugby guys took me under their wing, we had a good season that year and from then on I loved it.”

Naylor considered Oxford but, a small-town boy from Wales, he felt “intimidated” and out of his depth on the Oxford interview circuit. His own comprehensive school in Wales “had no idea” how to apply to the States; he was the first to venture to America. He now works hard to raise awareness of funding available for talented, super-bright state-school kids, one group that is lagging behind in American applications.

Norman Renshaw, who manages Intuition Scholarships, a clearing-house for 110 non-Ivy-League universities with international scholarships to give away, aims to entice people to different locations, generally perceived to be the flyover zone — everywhere from Florida and Louisiana to Missouri and Idaho. “People think, ‘If I can get a good-quality, well-ranked university over there, it will only cost me $8,000 a year,’ ” he says. These universities needn’t be sniffed at. “They may not have the Ivy League tag,” says Halls, “but you pass a lot of them on the world league tables before you get to somewhere like Edinburgh University [ranked 20th in the world, just behind the University of Michigan]”.

“I had universities throwing scholarships at me when I applied to the US,” says Hays. “But they were lesser-known ones. It’s annoying that Princeton only give financial aid if you can’t afford to come — they don’t give scholarships, even for the brightest kids, if you can pay. And my family can.” But if you are sporty, or after the American experience and aren’t too fussed about the Ivy Leagues, there are plenty of alternatives with extremely lucrative scholarship deals.

Hayley Thompson, 23, a highly motivated ex-Millfield girl, turned down a medical degree at King’s College London for a scholarship and a broad liberal arts education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She considers it a great decision. “I sailed in Maine and conserved manatees in Mexico. It opened me up to experiences like Thanksgiving and Hallowe’en.”

For the basketball coach Matt Shaw, 31, the outstanding sports facilities and rigorous coaching were the draw. After four years between the College of the Desert in California and University of Mary in North Dakota, he’s now running the Noel-Baker basketball academy in Derby and sticking close to the US style of teaching: “If you didn’t study, you didn’t play. That’s a powerful way to teach kids.”

Paul Kelly, the headmaster of Monkseaton High School in North Tyneside, advises caution, however. “You have to be very careful what you buy into.” His school made headlines in 2000 when its pupil Laura Spence was rejected by Oxford then taken on by Harvard, a move that sparked accusations of “political elitism”. “America has a much wider range of universities than England, both better and worse, and it is highly inadvisable to go to one that doesn’t appear on the league tables, has a very small number of students or is very new.”

Location is also important. No matter how fantastic the scholarship deal is, no child is going to thank you for sending them to a No Country for Old Men-style outback, where a sweltering, dust-ridden trip to the pub ends staring down the barrel of a redneck’s gun. “America is not all beaches and cosmopolitan and the things you see on the television,” says Kelly. “There are states with good universities like Colorado and Kansas, but the environment can be harsh and it’s a long way to go to get to anywhere.”

And as much as aspirational parents might hope their child is a Steve Jobs in the making, it’s best to be realistic. “You can get kids who think, ‘I won’t get to Oxbridge so I’ll go to Yale,’” says Halls. “Which is idiotic.” Professor Niall Ferguson, the British historian who, before his current post as a professor at Harvard, taught at Oxbridge, adds: “It’s about twice as hard to get into Harvard as it is Oxford. Only 7% of applicants are successful.” This figure, an all-time low, follows others with falling admission rates such as Yale at 7.5%, down almost 1%, and Stanford at 7.6%, a fall of over 2% on the year before.

Anyone who does get into a top American uni soon realises that the study is intense. “My son says he’s startled by the amount of teaching he gets compared with his friends studying here,” says Emma Duncan, the deputy editor of The Economist, whose son Jack Harman, 19, is studying at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. And Natalie Durant, 19, who is three months into a degree at Stanford, says it can be tough. “Sometimes you feel everyone is so much cleverer than you, or better at a sport or just generally more accomplished,” she says - quite something coming from a top-of-the-range ex-Lady Eleanor Holles schoolgirl.

James Cartright, 32, an officer with the Royal Gurkha Rifles, who graduated from Rutgers in New Jersey nine years ago, calls the learning “brilliant”. His sentiment is shared by Jasmine Hay. “I love the open structure of the degree, and how I can choose to take classes in pretty much anything,” she raves. “It’s incredible. I’ve learnt so much about subjects like philosophy that I never would have got to take in the British system.”

But it’s not for everyone. For those who know exactly what they want to study, a liberal-arts degree won’t specialise fast enough. And some subjects, like law, don’t transfer overseas without a lot more work when you get back. “I recommend the cheapest option,” says Sprenkle. “If the American school offers full funding, take it. Resources and facilities will likely be better but not necessarily the teaching. I have a hard time justifying that my diploma, even from a leading university, cost my parents $140,000.”

British university leavers tend to soar up career ladders, leaving their American counterparts eating their dust — something that irritates many Ivy League graduates who have to return to university to re-train in a speciality. But a stretch in America can open doors, as Alice Howard can attest. “After graduation I moved to New York and got an internship in fashion PR,” she says. “When I came back to London for a holiday I went to the PR firm Freud where I’d interned before the States and said, ‘Look! Hire me.’ I think there was a sense of, ‘This girl took herself to the States so if she wants something, she’ll go for it.’ I was thrown in at the deep end in the fast-paced, cut-throat fashion-PR world in New York and it definitely helped me be punchier in London.”

Cartwright also got a boost. “Americans believe you can do stuff,” he says. “I want to become an astronaut, how am I going to do that? Let’s give it a shot. I’m a bit like that anyway, but I thrived on the unfettered enthusiasm.”

It’s worth sparing a thought for those who have a lot to lose, in the short term at least: the parents. Financial loss pales in comparison to the loss of control over a child and the physical separation. “It’s a complete and utter disaster,” wails Robert Beecham. “But they are happy - which is all well and good as long as they don’t meet any nice American boys.” The internet offers some comfort: Hay emails her mother daily and skypes her family twice a week, but Montgomery sees many parents struggle with the decision to let them go. “They largely want their children to stay on the east coast to keep them closer,” she says. “Sending a child to California is daunting.”

And it’s worth being aware that the experience will change your child, possibly beyond recognition. Parents hoping for more sophistication may open the door to a strange creature in sweat pants with a Yogi Bear accent and a stomach to match. Others may notice alarming habits, like their previously TV-addicted child reading Kafka and trying out their newly acquired transatlantic lilt on anyone within earshot. But it’s highly likely that what comes back will be a delight. “Charlotte’s got an interview for a placement at American Harper’s Bazaar! It’s part of the deal - incredible, isn’t it?” says Beecham’s father proudly. Indeed, and how very à la mode.

How they rank:
The world's top universities

1 Harvard

2 Cambridge

3 Yale

4 University College London

5 = Imperial College London

5 = Oxford

7 Chicago

8 Princeton

9 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

10 California Institute of Technology