Trinity College, Cambridge vs Stanford, why UK students should at least consider US colleges in their university application

Puzhong Yao
Sep 5, 2018 · 11 min read

Hi, guys, my name is Puzhong and I am very glad to be standing here and having this chat with you today about my experience at Trinity College, Cambridge and Stanford University in the US. Hopefully I will be able to convince you to at least take a look at the US institutions when it is time to apply for universities.

Firstly, I must admit that it was something that I didn’t do myself when I was in your seats. I did my A-level in a school called Hurtwood House in Surrey. Despite we had an extraordinary American Maths teacher Leighton, somehow, nobody applied for any US universities back then. We had all heard of, say, Harvard of course, and if you went back in time and asked me whether I would like to go to Harvard? The answer was a hell yes. Harvard is THE one and only university amongst Chinese households and I had heard my fair share of it from my parents and neighbours. But maybe there were just too many fun things going on for us back then at Hurtwood, or maybe because Harvard was not an option in the UCAS like Cambridge or maybe we were simply too lazy to go through the SATs etc, none of us applied. I never thought about it or even considered it as a decision I made. After all, I was just doing what everyone else was doing, nothing more and nothing less. But later on when I had the chance to attend Stanford’s business school, I considered my inaction at high school a mistake. I would like to tell you why and let you make more informed decisions.

After we finished our exams in our final year at Trinity, our senior tutor took all the economists out for a dinner to celebrate our incoming graduation. After the table was cleared and we waited for our desserts, the professor took out a bunch of papers, waved in the air and asked everyone to guess what they were. Someone nervously asked whether the exam results had come out already and it was a great relief the professor answered no. With no more volunteers, the professor went on to reveal the answer. They were the Personal Statements all of us wrote in our UCAS application. In these, all of us stated that we would devote our lives to the study and research of economics. The professor went on to ask how come in just three years, all but one of us had decided to work for the Investment Banks instead, with five going to join Goldman Sachs alone. The remaining one person also changed her mind and was going to do another degree in medicine. “Why, why and why?” The professor demanded. Silence fell on the table and all of our eyes set firmly on our glasses. It took a few minutes, which felt more like a century, till someone finally spoke. “Sir, it was a decision I made at 16 when I had to pick my classes for AS. Out of all the decisions I made back then, this is the one I have managed to keep for the longest already.” The room broke into a laughter and the professor let us off on that topic after that.

I share this story not to mock my fellow economists — if you pick any other fields, the results will be very similar — but to illustrate the point that our education system in the UK specializes very early on. After one has picked her subjects for A level, she has pretty much mapped out the degrees she could study in the university and in turn the rough direction of her career after graduation. And this is not to mention Sixth Form schools themselves would ask subject specific questions when they interview their own applicants, pushing this decision even earlier to GCSE stage. I don’t think many people would expect a GCSE student to know what she would do for her life but that is essentially what we are asking here. Life is so unfair, isn’t it?

US system on the other hand, remains very broad till the end of the undergraduate. When one applies for a US university, one doesn’t apply for any particular department like we do here but just the university. Then everyone who gets in must study across a number of disciplines in their first two years: English, Maths, natural science, social science and foreign language. While they do declare a major for the last two years, it is very loosely defined and offers a lot of flexibility compared to what we have here. While we tend to finish our education after undergraduate, it is fairly common for US students to attend graduate schools and that is where they specialise. For example, I went to the business school at Stanford for an MBA degree and there are other graduate schools where you can go for a similar postgraduate degree such as the law school, education school, medicine school, and engineering school etc. You get the idea. In a way, their universities are like a combination of our GCSE and A levels and their graduate schools are like our undergraduates. This way, the decision of what to study and what to do for one’s life is pushed back a number of years.

But before you get too excited, let me warn you that such decisions are the hardest ones in our lives. You can ask your parents and teachers and I think they will agree. Delaying them for a few years from mid-teens to early 20s might give you more time to think about them, but it could also mean you have even more questions than answers than when you were a teenager. Going to a top university won’t automatically get you enlightened neither. Sorry, you still have to find it out for yourself the hard way.

Besides, if you are sure what you want to study already at high school, then our specialized system here in the UK might be the one that suits you anyway. The supervision/tutorial system in Oxbridge in my opinion are the best the world has to offer when it comes to teaching specific knowledge and critical thinking skills. Earlier this year, I met someone who majored in economics at Stanford before coming to Cambridge to do a master’s degree in economics. While I generally found my postgraduate time very enjoyable at Stanford — that was after the three years of grilling at Cambridge and also due to the less academic nature of an MBA degree — my counterparty found it a lot harder here at Cambridge. In his own words, “everyone else had studied economics for 5 years already (2 years of A level plus 3 years of undergraduate) while I had done only a bit more than a year in the US despite majoring in Economics, I had to do a lot of catch-up in order to graduate.” So I hope you see now how UK and US universities are very different in the width and depth of their curriculum design, suiting different people with different needs. Have a think about which might suit you better.

Outside academics, the other large difference between UK and US universities or at least some US universities is the amount of resources they command. UK universities are all public. They used to receive all their funding from the government directly and students could attend free of charge. Only recently, they started to charge tuition fees from students as well. Sorry guys, you were all born too late. In UK universities’ long histories, they rarely needed to worry about funding that much and they didn’t. And why should they? Universities are for academics after all, but not businessman, right? So the UK universities are mostly run on a break-even basis every year with only a selected few managed to build up any other significant revenue sources or a reserve in terms of endowment fund.

A number of US universities on the other hand, managed to do a lot more. On my first campus tour at Stanford, I saw its American football stadium which had a capacity of 50,000 people. The stadium is just for American football alone and there are separate stadiums and facilities for basketball, swimming, gyms etc. I commented that was ridiculous as no UK university would dream to have such premier league class stadium and even if they do, it will surely not be just for one sport. One of my American classmate on the tour agreed but he said this was ridiculously small. He had gone to University of Texas (UT) for undergraduate and their stadium could seat 100,000 people. He wondered whether all the Stanford fans were able to fit in on a match day. Later on, he asked me what Cambridge had got. Well, I had to tell him that if we averaged Cambridge and UT, we got Stanford!

These US universities, while non-profit in nature, have managed to become extremely wealthy. If we compare LSE, where my wife attended and a world-class university by itself, Cambridge and Stanford for example, we could see it clearly. While they have similar overall student numbers, LSE operates on an annual budget of £350 million pound, compared to Cambridge’s £1.8 billion and finally Stanford’s $6 billion dollars. Stanford has an endowment of $25 billion (or about $1.5 million per student), 5 times the size of Cambridge’s and 50 times of LSE’s. As a result, money is a rarely an issue at Stanford and everything is world class, from research, teaching and recreational facilities to the sharpest minds on the planet. And why not? Just imagine you are running your school with a $6 billion budget, wouldn’t you want to have the best in everything possible as well? And it is very similar at other top US universities as well. Unfortunately, we could not match them here in the UK relying on government funding and tuition fees. Even if we try, there will simply be a rebellion when the bill comes at the end of the year.

But sometimes one would feel whether there is so much money in the US that not all is well spent. For example, Stanford has more bicycle stands than the number of students and the discussions to build ever more car parks are always ongoing. It is probably justified given we have things like 50,000 capacity football stadiums to serve, but all of these I imagine would be the least worries of our UK vice-Chancellors. If the lecturers don’t’ go on strike over salaries and pension and students don’t walk out over the ever-increasing tuitions, they will probably be very happy. Parking concerns, are you kidding me?

Jokes aside, one area where US universities are way ahead of their UK counterparts is the alumni network. In the UK, Oxbridge, with their collegiate systems, offer the best alumni network already. After all, when you live in a small and beautiful court together for three years, going to the same dining hall, library, college bar and staircases every day, even the introverts like me can make some good friends. If I am in another university where I have to look for my own accommodations in a big city by myself and only go to the campus when there is a lecture, it would be a lot harder. Even then once I graduated, I rarely heard much from Cambridge. But maybe that is just part of our British culture. If you have previously been from another school, I imagine you probably don’t hear much from it neither.

US universities on the other hand and Stanford in particular, have very strong alumni networks, even for alumni across different years. When I cold e-mail Stanford alumni that I didn’t know, I rarely got ignored. One of my most treasured moment in the US was the visit I made to the HQ of Costco, my favourite supermarket. I found out the CFO of Costco was a Stanford alumnus and I cold e-mailed him. He not only replied but invited me to visit him at his office for a tour and a chat. It was simply incredible. I know you might find it weird I like a supermarket that much, but if you have been to one, you surely understand. Costco, like Stanford, is simply heaven to me and many others. Such opportunity is very unlikely here in the UK. I see Cambridge is trying to change towards that direction, but it might take a long time before it gets there.

Speaking on the resources, you might have seen tuition fees US universities charge. If your parents ask you to double check whether that nearly $50,000 figure is for the whole program or just one year, I would not blame them. But the good news is that US universities are a lot like department stores in this regard. They all put some very high ticker prices on display but then offers steep discounts to attract customers. Tuition fees plus food and board at a number of US universities come at around $70,000 per year, but rarely anyone pays it. If you family is not too wealthy — and the bar here is quite high — you will get fee discount in terms of scholarships from the university. For a lot of students, it will be even cheaper than to attend a UK university and to some, it will be completely free, even the food and board. But the difficult part lies in the application process itself. US college admission is very different and a lot more complex than UCAS. I used to complain that UCAS limited my choices to just six courses and didn’t give me much room to write anything personal neither. The Personal Statement was by name only and had to follow a quite rigid structure. But I completely changed my mind once I went through my MBA application. Even though I only applied to two university and wrote five essays, I found the workload to be like a full-time job already. I then found out people routinely applied for ten, fifteen or even more universities and I can not imagine how they managed it. UCAS is a life saver, trust me. And you might wonder why being good at writing essays and writing narrative based essays in particular is required for everybody? But I guess that is what you get when you ask for a broad liberal arts education.

The last reason I encourage you to look beyond UK for your university is the perspective you would pick up by going to an unfamiliar place. Till I was 12 years old and had my first English class in middle school, I thought everyone in the world spoke Chinese. I had never met anyone who didn’t — and living in China, I had met a lot of people. Even Skywalker and the aliens were speaking Chinese when I watched Star Wars on TV for the first time that year. It is obvious when I think about it now, what else can they show on Chinese TV? But it is surprisingly hard for one to figure out something one doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know. Just like it took me to watch a Star War movie in English to realize Skywalker’s mother tongue is English, it might take you to go to some places where a 50,000 stadium is ridiculously small to broaden your own horizon.

After you have given the university question some serious thoughts, don’t forget to relax neither. In my view, the name of the university mattes a lot less than how you spend your time there. If you enjoy learning, you will do well either way and if you don’t, going to Cambridge or Stanford will be like hell. Even if you get an offer, don’t go. Try drinking water from a fire hose and you will see why.

Thank you.

Puzhong Yao

Puzhong Yao

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