@worriestoomuch — the weather in Britain is far from ideal, but not much different from where I live now. And you’re right, the admissions process is much more logical and more suited to my strengths, as my grades are good, and I’ll be graduating with an IB diploma, bye I don’t really have many extracurricular activities.
As for my classics major, I’m pretty sure that’s what I want. Now, I don’t know if I want to be a classicist (in the sense of getting a PhD in the Classics) but it’s one of the most versatile of the pure humanities degrees. I can go for a postgraduate qualification in history, philosophy, literature, linguistics etc. I can go to law school, or I can enter into the working world. My other interests, are much less versatile and require a PhD, a JD or at least a teaching certificate to be worth much.
The main reason I asked this question was to see if I was missing something. For someone whose sure about what they want to study, wants to save money, wants to finish their BA in three years and may be disinterested in the frat/football culture of many American colleges, it seems like British universities are an obvious choice. However there are very few American students in British universities, and the majority of them are postgraduate students at Oxford, Cambridge or LSE, or MBA students at London Business School — I wanted to see if there was a reason why that I wasn’t realizing. It can’t be distance, because a student from the East Coast studying in Britain isn’t much farther away from home than he would be if he studied in California, the student visa process isn’t particularly arduous and the top universities in Britain have more name recognition than many American universities and colleges. What is it?