Lucy Ward reports on the Sutton Trust US summer school programme in The Guardian.

Sutton Trust summer-schools scheme to encourage poorer students to higher education expands to world-class US universities.

“For me it was a no-brainer,” Harvard student Gemma Collins said of her decision last year to reject a Cambridge University offer and head instead from Blackpool Sixth Form College to a fully-funded Ivy League education.

The lure of a “debt-free degree”, thanks to Harvard’s generous bursary system for low-income applicants, together with the attraction of a broad liberal arts degree and American campus life, outweighed the prospect of heavy tuition fee debts at home in the UK, Collins told a London gathering of sixth-formers keen to follow her across the Atlantic.

The 200 British 16- and 17-year-olds busily comparing the merits of Oxford and Princeton were part of a programme launched by the education charity the Sutton Trust to open up the opportunities offered by world-class US universities to bright UK students like Collins from low and middle income backgrounds.

This year, 175 students, most of them the first in their families to go to university, will be selected from the latest group to attend week-long summer schools at Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, and to receive intensive support as they navigate the intricacies of the competitive US application system this autumn. All potential candidates come from state schools, 44% qualify for free school meals, and all have family incomes under £45,000 a year – low enough to attract the bursaries without which US university fees would be prohibitively high.

Read the full article here