As the spring semester continues, more and more students are hearing back from their dream schools, and it’s not always great news. With admissions rates, especially for regular decision, reaching record lows, you’re not alone in looking overseas. However, that doesn’t mean that there’s a lot of competition.
In fact, plenty of places would love to have your child, and chances are that they are more highly ranked than many universities that wouldn’t give them the time of day in the US.
The UK
Is the UK necessarily the best choice for everyone? No. However, is it a decent option for the majority of the people here? Perhaps. It is going to be more expensive (yet strangely cheaper than some in-state options in the US), but there are some limited merit scholarships depending on where you look.
In the past, you had to know exactly what you wanted to study to go to the UK. That is no longer the case. A growing number of programs in liberal arts are offered, which let you focus as you wish; think Brown’s approach to core curriculum courses.
Not everywhere will have applications still open; Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, and LSE definitely don’t, and you’d be hard-pressed to find an option at UCL or KCL (other than their foundation years). However, programs at St. Andrews, Manchester, and other Russell Group schools are still taking applications for many fields from international students.
Europe
So maybe your child wants more flexibility, or lower costs, than the UK. In that case, the EU may be the best place for you to look. From Ireland to Scandinavia, many programs still have open dates. In the Netherlands, they’ve got about a month to apply to many English-language programs.
But if they happen to want to study at many Spanish or Italian universities, they’ll have to wait. Not until next year, but until applications open up! For some places, you can’t apply to spring, with a handful of deadlines as late as mid May.
Australia/New Zealand
Want a place where you graduate from one of the top 50 universities in the world with an ACT score of 24? Then look to Australia and New Zealand. Seriously, these may be the best kept secrets in international admissions. Their academic year runs from February to November, but because they use a semester system, you can enter over summer in the Northern Hemisphere.
Additionally, they’re quite affordable. While not quite as cheap as the mythical ‘free college in Germany’ that people talk about, a lot of Federal financial aid works there (as well as the UK and much of Europe), so it’s not quite so out of reach.
Best of all, you can apply for entry in semester 1 (or February) and take a gap semester to live a little. Or to try an ED app to a T20 again, your choice.
What Matters
Of course, all this is useless without knowing what international universities look for. In short, we’re talking about very brief applications. Typically applicants send in their grades or test scores, and while most places in the UK and Ireland require a personal statement, many places elsewhere don’t. At the end of the day, what matters most is that they want to study whatever it is they want to study, at the place that they’ve applied. Whether it is in a personal statement or a brief cover letter (yes, those exist too), if your child can get that across, with decent grades they should be able to avoid a less than ideal safety school, and hopefully have a much better price point as well.