Home and away: the British teenagers who have won scholarships at America’s top universities

A new programme is offering British teenagers from low-income families the opportunity to study at the best, most exclusive universities in America, including Harvard, Yale and Columbia. Rhik Samadder talks to five of the 61 gifted students embarking on a great adventure this autumn.

For most of us, the great American universities are a mystery – we know Harvard, Yale, Brown and Princeton as the oak-panelled nurseries of presidents and social-media tycoons. They are stunningly expensive, with fees of up to $60,000 (£37,580) per year dwarfing those in the UK. Studying there can seem an impossible dream.

For those with ambition but no trust fund, there is the Sutton Trust, which promotes social mobility through education. Through a scheme it piloted last year with the Fulbright Commission’s US-UK exchange programme, 61 state-school students from Britain travelled across the Atlantic in September to enroll. The scheme targets students from families with low annual incomes, the majority with less than £25,000.

Many will be the first in their family to go to university. Their lives are about to be turned upside down as they swap jobs in McDonald’s for Nobel laureate tutors and apartments on Broadway. Will it be four years of keg parties and developing strange hybrid accents? Or 3,000 miles of homesickness? We met five of the brightest just before they left to ask what they are looking forward to and what they are nervous about.

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