This post was written by Ben Waxman, founder and CEO of Intead, a global academic branding and market research consultancy.
This past February at the British Ambassador Dame Karen Pierce’s private residence in Washington, D.C., the British Council’s alumni awards recognized some of the most remarkable international talent that has emerged from UK higher education.
Laureates from Greece, China, India, the United States, and more sparkled with pride as honors were doled out. Our team practically supernova’d, as much in shared joy for the winners, as for the opportunity to be proud in the presence of Ambassador Pierce’s personally curated art collection, including an original Warhol of Queen Elizabeth II.
It was a night to remember, full of charming university memories, and, one sentiment that found a place in almost every speech: let’s get more people who want this experience into the UK’s higher education system so they can seize it.
Our team knew that dream was already galloping past some significant milestones.
In our ongoing work with the British Council, we’ve been awed witnesses to the incredible surge in the rate of international ed-seekers going full English breakfast. Most staggeringly, the rate of US natives jumping the pond for higher education: from 2021 to 2022 alone, the UK experienced a record-breaking 37% surge in new US students.
Pent-up wanderlust after a global pandemic explains a bit of that explosion, but not enough. Measured another way, the UK saw a 15% increase in US students over pre-Covid numbers from 2019 to 2020. In contrast, Italy–historically the US-native’s most popular international education destination–saw a scant 1.1% increase in new US students across the same time period. What’s the story?
Absent the addition of a mocha frappe to the British pub menu, our research points to one stirring trend in the qualitative data, and one 17-point Scrabble word…
Intentionality.
A higher education system that stands in contrast to the longer, more explorational approach of so many students in the US–land of the BA, BS, and sometimes BFA–the UK is assembling degree programs so sculpted they border into the delightfully verbose. How very British.
Pent-up wanderlust after a global pandemic explains a bit of that explosion, but not enough
Take the B.Eng., the UK’s Bachelors of Engineering track, a path that primes learners in cross-disciplinary engineering applications and processes. Or the B.Ed., Bachelors of Education, a degree most often pursued by students who want hands-on teaching experience while they themselves are still in school.
Deliciously meta. And so different from the American model where one’s concentration is more akin to an appendage to their broader liberal curriculum.
This straight-shooting approach to accreditation typifies a uniquely valuable educational convention UK universities have, intentionally or not, long crafted: a learning environment that scraps the superfluous and, in its place, channels a stark specification of the student’s desired educational path, and their desired outcomes.
We think the result is a championing of specialisation and self-sovereignty that speaks to a career-focused mindset without giving up personal development.
Take one US learner honored at the alumni awards, Michelle Szydlowski. Already a successful graduate of her native higher ed system, Szydlowski was in her forties when she began to explore programs in anthrozoology. She wanted a learning environment that honored her personal interests and her drive for research innovation, and found that across the US, the standard student research track would have required her to join another researcher’s lab and devote herself to that lab runner’s agenda.
In other words, the broader and more exploratory US education model was so exploratory, so keen to educate on the tails of another’s passion (not a bad model for instruction, just a different one), that its very vastness would have been, in this case, a pretty counterproductive constraint.
Americans have always rivalled the Brits as masters of irony (not that the Brits would share that title willingly).
An activities-packed cruise-line of an education is fantastic for many. But for the modern student ready to go from 0 to 90, perhaps a tidy two-seater Aston Martin is a better fit than a sprawling Cadillac SUV.
Americans have always rivalled the Brits as masters of irony
For learners like Szydlowski, who eventually enrolled in a pioneering program in anthro-zoology at the University of Exeter that allowed her to pursue her own research agenda, the US’s education-by-osmosis couldn’t compare to the UK’s higher education paradigm which enables a truly high-precision educational mission.
This world is filled with endless distractions, and the call for intentionality, especially in our schooling, may have a more profound resonance than we’ve ever seen before.
As the UK’s shorter, cheaper, more discretionary programs continue to exemplify this new alignment, US students, and more, who consider the UK may find the road less traveled leads them exactly where they want to go.
