Rising number of UK students move to study in the US

The number of UK students moving to study in the US has increased for the sixth successive year, as revealed by annual figures from the Institute of International Education.

More than 10,000 students from the UK attended US universities in the year 2013-2014, marking an eight percent increase from the previous year, according to the figures gathered by the US State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

The figure is taken from the first batch of students to face the trebling of England’s tuition fee caps to £9,000.

According to the BBC, the UK students are estimated to be worth £216 million to the US economy.

Alex Millen, a fourth-year English undergraduate at Warwick was attracted to American universities because of the breadth of study they offer: “At Berkeley I was able to take classes in Spanish, Jazz Theory and Performance Theatre. […] I like to think I have benefited from the contrast.”

The most popular universities for these UK students include, Harvard, Columbia, New York University, University of California Berkeley and Yale.

Rachel Meehan, also a fourth-year English undergraduate at Warwick, added: “I had about double the contact time at Vanderbilt than I have at Warwick and believe that, as a humanities student, you get a lot more contact time at US universities, generally.”

There are 886,000 international students in the US. Though students from the UK make up the largest group of European students studying in the US, the 10,191 UK students who went to the US last year are a small portion of the total.

China, India and South Korea account for about half of all of the international students in the US.

Factors preventing UK students applying to the US involve cost and visa barriers. Ms Meehan commented: “I think cost is the major barrier to UK students studying in the US. If I had to pay Vanderbilt’s tuition fees for my year abroad, they could have cost me up to $41,088 for that year alone.

“Most of those funds had to come from my parents, as my UK student loan only covered a fraction of them. Vanderbilt’s expenses also did not include fairly major expenses like my plane ticket and visa!”

Katie Moores, a fourth-year English undergraduate who studied at the University of California, Santa Barbara for a year, pointed out that the costs vary depending on whether the university is private or public:

“What I realised while I was out there is that, while private universities are incredibly expensive, the public universities are not so bad.

“Especially now that the English fees have been raised, I expect more people will study in America.”

In comparison, there are also more US students choosing to study in the UK. The most recent figures reveal more than 36,000 in UK universities.