Reply to Anyone’s child considering university in England?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]But the opposite is also true. I am from Eastern Europe. [b]A vast majority of Harvard kids would not be able to pass entrance exams at any of the schools.[/b] They simply do not have the level of knowledge required for entry (and study). If they studied for months, sure, but as they are right now - no way.

You need to understand that expectations from incoming freshmen are entirely different. Nobody cares about your sports or the non profit you started. Even your gold medal at a math Olympiad will not get you a place at an engineering school much less anywhere else. You think your fencing class presidents are so impressive, fine, but that doesn’t translate abroad as much as you think it does.[/quote]

This is patently false, and sounds like European propaganda a la [b]"Americans are dumb[/b]".[/quote]

Well unfortunately the UK admissions folks all believe it. I studied Art History for A level in the UK (amongst others) and knew more about it than a friend in the US who was studying it as a major at a State University. I was astonished.[/quote]

From upthread:

"As someone who lived in the Uk for four years with a spouse who taught A levels and supported the application process for the kids applying uni….. I can say with 100% certainty that this comparison is complete hogwash. I personally KNOW kids heading to KCL and only when pigs fly would they ever have had a chance at Cornell Berkeley Dartmouth UCLA. They were B+ students at best. I know kids going to Oxbridge and while they were incredibly hard workers they were by no means as impressive as some of the students I know at Princeton for example. And No One from the international school applied to St Andrew’s… Bath Warwick Edinborough and Durham but St. Andrews? It is a joke."

So, competing anecdotes. Across almost all criteria, elite American universities are harder to gain entry into than elite UK universities.[/quote]

No. Because in the UK you need approval from your school before applying. No one gets to apply to either Oxford or Cambridge without the express approval of their schools. They just cannot do it, so it is a self-selecting group, and the "acceptance rates" just are not comparable to US colleges. If you only have the top 1% of students applying and 54% of those are accepted, it is apples to oranges when in the US literally ANYONE can apply to an ivy and 3-7% are accepted. IT is a huge pool in comparison.[/quote]

NP. THIS.  Plus you have to pick between Oxford and Cambridge.[/quote]

Also, you can only apply to five schools so there are fewer YOLO applications to long shots. [/quote]

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