mate…i made it clear ‘not to vent’. Oxbridge have very high connections to the top of the political elite around the world - many politicians in Britain and ex-colonies went there - there are plenty of prominent people in the US who did undergrad or postgrad there. you get admitted mostly based on your grades and interest/ability in the subject. I’ve got nothing against the American system because I already do those ECs. it was an innocent question not a vindictive or ungrateful complaint…
i think just to add more detail to my financial situation. IF I got into a genuinely top school (globally) like Harvard/Stanford/Yale/UCLA my parents would be willing to pay full fees, that’s possible because its a justifiable expense. However, if I got into UT Austin and UCL at the same time then I’d obviously go to UCL because its much cheaper. But 10,000-16,000 of aid a year would just relieve financial pressure
I am just explaining to you the structural forces that help answer the question you asked. My purpose in doing that is just to help you better understand why the US admissions and aid system looks like it does, including for international students.
Oxbridge courses actually typically make their final admissions decisions based on interviews with the tutors in that course in the relevant constituent college, which is an element of subjective review that is not always fully appreciated. And in fact, Oxbridge course admissions look very similar to, say, top PhD program admissions in the United States.
This is explainable in part because Oxbridge courses are actually much more like graduate than undergraduate programs from a US perspective. If you are admitted to, say, Harvard College, you can study whatever you like. Indeed, you are actually required to take a diversity of courses, and are really expected to explore your options before deciding on your major. Harvard’s graduate programs do not work like that, but the College does.
Harvard College therefore could not have, say, the professors in a given major interview applicants, because there is every chance those applicants will end up majoring in sometime entirely different, and they will never see that applicant again. Whereas the tutors at a given Oxbridge constituent college in a given course know they will be working closely with any students they admit to that course at that college, because those students are not going to be off exploring and then choosing different courses. They are locked in.
It is nonetheless true a few US students decide to do undergrad courses at Oxbridge, or other prominent UK universities. But not nearly as many as you might expect, given that many high-numbers US applicants have the exact same concerns about the predictability of admissions at highly selective US colleges. And what often happens is they are initially excited about the idea of attending a prestigious UK university, and then they learn about this lock-in issue, and then many decide to attend a US exploratory college instead.
Again there are some restricted undergrad majors in the US that more closely resemble the UK course system, but those are typically at the sorts of public universities that high-numbers internationals may not consider more desirable than their non-US equivalents.
OK, so yes, the socioeconomic elite of the UK often attend Oxbridge, and they are apparently fine with this sort of structure. But many of the US socioeconomic elites on full consideration prefer the US sort of exploratory college structure, and of course again the US colleges in question still have those US socioeconomic elites as their prime market. And that US exploratory model then dictates the sort of centralized general admissions those US colleges use, as opposed to the Oxbridge tutor-interview system which makes sense for the way they lock people into courses at constituent colleges.
Edit: By the way, maintaining this sort of the exploratory structure is just one of the ways in which operating a competitive top-tier US college is horrifically expensive, much more expensive per student than even Oxbridge. The other really expense part is maintaining competitive offerings across all the non-academic components expected in the US “residential college” experience.
Oxbridge are interesting, though, in that most of their constituent colleges sort of operate like private US colleges (actually like private US Small Liberal Arts Colleges) with their own endowments. So, Oxford the overarching university only has an endowment of about 1.7B GBP, but the constituent colleges have another 6.4B GBP in total.
Still, that is just a little over 10B USD in total (university plus colleges). HYPSM each have radically larger endowments. Oxford is more in the, say, Vanderbilt range, and even then Oxford is like twice the size of Vanderbilt.
Again, I am just pointing out how ludicrously wealthy the most “prestigious” US colleges tend to be. And that feeds into norms for what they can offer both academically and non-academically that even Oxbridge can’t really afford.
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I think @NiceUnparticularMan was merely explaining the US process in more detail to help in understanding WHY these elite schools can’t just accept people with good grades who read and are interested in them. Do the equivalent British universities have 50,000 applicants? Or do kids with no shot at going even apply? Personally, I think the admissions numbers here are overinflated by kids with no chance in h*** of getting in submitting an application. And I do think the American “system” is rather broken.
But back to your situation, you will be best served by diving deeply into the financial pages of all of the colleges you are interested in attending to see which give aid to International students and go from there.
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