Studying abroad: US in a league of its own

The Telegraph

Which country is the number one foreign-study destination? A glance at the upper reaches of the latest Times Higher Education World University Rankings is all you need to find your answer. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), California Institute of Technology (Caltech): there are no fewer than seven US institutions in the top 10, and 21 in the top 30, so it’s little wonder that the US is popular with British students.

“I think students realise that going to the US says something about them,” says Lauren Welch, head of advising at the Fulbright Commission, which represents American universities in the UK. In a recent survey, 91 per cent of British students cited the quality of universities as a reason for choosing the US.

But when it comes to studying Stateside, it’s not all about household names. Many world-class institutions in the US are not well known in Britain, but thanks to a less specialised curriculum, the US can be the right place if you want to expand your horizons rather than narrow your study options.

Lorna Morris, a first-year student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, chose to apply to the US because she was having difficulty finding a British course that suited her needs. “I was doing my A-levels and I really didn’t know what I wanted to study,” says Morris, who is from Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey. “I applied in the UK for history — but was sure I didn’t want to do only one subject and I couldn’t find courses that exactly matched what I wanted to do.”

For Morris, the liberal arts curriculum at UNC Chapel Hill means she doesn’t have to declare her “major”, or main area of study, until the end of her first year. In the meantime she has taken classes ranging from psychology to languages to politics.