Rising tuition pushes British students to US

Don Guttenplan reports for the International New York Times on the success of the Sutton Trust US Programme.

LONDON — For Ade Olatunde, turning down Oxford University was a no-brainer. A senior at Mossbourne Academy, a state-funded school in Hackney, a gritty district in the East End of London, Mr. Olatunde will enroll at the University of North Carolina this fall.

“I know I want to study geography and city planning, but I’m not too sure about the rest,” said Mr. Olatunde, who also turned down a place at the London School of Economics. “That’s one reason for doing this.”

The lure of a broader liberal arts curriculum, and the chance to combine science with humanities, has contributed to a steep rise in applications from British students to American universities, according to officials at the US-UK Fulbright Commission, an organization funded by the American and British governments to promote educational exchanges. But the British government’s decision two years ago to allow English universities to triple their tuition has also made a big difference.

At Oxford, annual tuition is now 9,000 pounds, or $15,000. The university offered Mr. Olatunde a fee reduction of about £1,000 a year, based on his family’s income, but he would have needed a government loan to cover the rest, leaving him with heavy debt on graduation.

“Compared with the chance to go to America, and to attend a top school for free, it wasn’t a difficult choice for me,” said Mr. Olatunde, who was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and came to Britain with his mother and sister in 2007.

Gemma Collins, from Blackpool, in the northwest of England, will start classes at Harvard this fall, the first member of her family to attend university. The chance to combine history and English with an interest in education policy was what initially drew her to consider studying in America. “Student debt, or needing to take out a student loan, didn’t really worry me,” she said. Still, when she learned that she could attend Harvard with all her tuition paid for, “my accommodation paid for, no loan, and even travel back home — the financial aid package was really amazing,” Ms. Collins said. “Harvard makes sure that if you can get in, you can afford to go.”

Both Mr. Olatunde and Ms. Collins are beneficiaries of a collaboration between the Sutton Trust, a British charity dedicated to improving social mobility through education, and the Fulbright Commission. The trust has long run summer programs for British students from low- and middle-income backgrounds to encourage them to apply to elite universities. In the summer of 2012, it first sent 64 students to Yale for a week, and 21 ended up going to American schools. Last summer, 150 students joined the program, hosted at Yale and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Of those, 64 — triple the number of two years ago — will head for America this fall.

Ms. Collins is one of three going to Harvard. The program is also sending five students to Princeton; three to Yale; three to Dartmouth; and one each to Brown, Columbia, Barnard and the University of Pennsylvania.

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“Our aim is to ensure that bright kids from low- and middle-income families have the same opportunities as their better-off peers,” said Peter Lampl, the trust’s founder.

To be eligible for the program, students must have a family income of less than £45,000 a year. This year, 60 percent come from families with annual incomes below £25,000, and nearly the same percentage will be the first in the family to attend university. John Jerrim, an economics researcher at London University’s Institute of Education, said that for such students, who could expect to graduate from a top English university with debts of £34,000 to £40,000, the chance to graduate debt-free from an American university is too good to turn down.

Read the full piece here