I Sent Two of My Kids to College in the UK. Most Americans Have No Idea What They’re Missing.

(Photo: My daughter graduating from Goldsmiths with her friend last year.)

My son went to St. Andrews. My daughter studied design at Goldsmiths, University of London.

We saved hundreds of thousands of dollars compared to what their American peers paid. Here is exactly how.

In 2024, my daughter Madison visited me in Lisbon during her summer break from Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was finishing her design degree.

We sat down for dinner at my favorite French restaurant, Grenache, and she looked across the table and said, “Dad, I just want you to know I am exactly where I want to be in my life, and I appreciate you allowing me to be myself.”

That is the moment every parent is working toward.

Twenty years of showing up, making calls, holding the line, letting them fall and watching them get back up. And there she was, twenty years old, living in one of the greatest cities on the planet, studying something she genuinely loved, thriving.

Now let me tell you what that moment also represented financially, because that part of the story is one almost no American parent is talking about, and they absolutely should be.

College, like healthcare, in America is ridiculously overpriced.

While Madison’s American peers were racking up $60,000 to $90,000 per year at private universities in the United States (+books, food and housing costs), signing their futures away to student loan servicers my daughter was completing a world-class design education in London at a fraction of that cost.

My son Jackson attended the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the English-speaking world, the same institution where Prince William and Kate met. His tuition? Also a fraction of what his American counterparts were paying.

Combined, across both kids, I saved somewhere in the range of $400,000 to $500,000 compared to equivalent private university educations in the United States.

That is not a rounding error. That is a house. That is a retirement account.

The actual numbers…

Average US private university: $60,000+ per year in tuition and fees.

UK tuition for international students: approximately $20,000 per year at most top universities.

UK degree length: 3 years versus 4 years standard in the US.

My daughter got her degree in 3 years and is just finishing her master’s in one year at one of the top schools in the world.

The savings are massive.

And that is before you factor in that UK undergraduate degrees are three years, not four.

You are not just paying less per year. You are paying for one fewer year of tuition, one fewer year of room and board, and one fewer year of your kid not yet in the workforce.

That last point compounds in ways most people do not think about. A year of lost earning potential on top of a year of additional tuition is a brutal double hit that the UK system simply does not impose.

The EU school system is also quite incredible, and when I looked at design programs in Italy for my daughter, the tuition was less than $5k per year!

Bottom line comparison (tuition per year)

• UK top universities $18,000 to $25,000

• Netherlands$9,000 to $12,000

• France (public)$3,000 to $4,000

• Spain (public)$1,500 to $3,500

• Italy (public)$2,500 to $5,000

• Germany (public)$0 to $350 (fees only)

• CH (Zurich) $1,500

I did not send my kids abroad purely to save money. I sent them because I believed, based on everything I had watched work with them growing up, that the experience of living in another country, navigating a foreign system, building a life somewhere unfamiliar, would do something to their character that no amount of campus amenities or Division I football games could replicate.

This is the part American parents tend to overlook when they run the numbers, because it does not show up on a spreadsheet.

When Jackson was in high school, before St. Andrews, he pitched me on a summer that included a school trip to Morocco, a solo month in Andalucía learning Spanish, and then a train ride to Madrid, where we linked up for a few weeks.

He was a young teenager. He laid out a plan and asked me to trust it. I said yes, and he came back speaking the dialect of self-reliance in ways that had nothing to do with Spanish grammar.

By the time he arrived at St. Andrews, he was not a kid discovering for the first time what it felt like to make his own decisions. He had been doing that. The international university experience did not introduce independence to him. It deepened it.

Madison was the same.

Her younger brother is in school in the US on my veteran's benefits, but we are talking about a year in Spain.

That is an important point for parents who worry about sending a kid abroad at eighteen. The preparation for that moment does not start when they board the plane. It starts years earlier, in the small decisions you make about when to step in and when to step back.

What the American university system does not want you to know

American higher education has, over the last thirty years, undergone one of the most spectacular pricing inflations in the history of any industry.

Tuition at private universities has increased by over 200 percent in inflation-adjusted terms since 1980.

The result is a generation of young Americans carrying a collective $1.7 trillion in student debt, many of whom made that decision at seventeen or eighteen years old with no real understanding of what they were signing or what it would cost them across a working lifetime.

My friend in New York (he works in finance) just paid off his student debt in his forties.

That’s insanity to me.

Is a UK degree recognized by American employers? Yes, broadly and increasingly so. In finance, technology, design, law, and academia, a degree from a strong UK institution carries significant weight. In some sectors, particularly global finance and consulting, it carries more than the equivalent American degree.

It also makes them a hell of a lot more interesting when they are applying for their first job out of school.

Is the application process complicated? No more so than applying to competitive American schools.

What about visas? A student visa for the UK or EU is a standard, well-documented process. Thousands of Americans navigate it every year without drama.

That math is worth running and can save you and your children from a mountain of student debt and if you can afford it…take the savings and buy them a house.

Thx for listening.

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