Ar_Hn

One point that the applicants usually miss out is when comparing the American and European / UK grad schools, is the acceptance rate and the competitiveness of the program. This, of course, shouldn't be too important if you spread out your choices across the spectrum of competitiveness appropriately, unless you really want a name that stands out on your resume. Getting into the American graduate schools seems to be much more difficult and highly competitive. You can find the admission stats of Cambridge for Master's programs here , and for the University of Michigan here. Of course in reputation, Cambridge is considered top 5 in the world, while Michigan is top 25, but the admission rate for masters programs at Michigan is much lower than Cambridge. (The Cam stats doesn't include Ph.D. degrees, but I doubt if that'd be still more competitive than Michigan as long as you have a decent research proposal). In fact, these numbers don't even fully reflect the difference in competitiveness, because they aren't demonstrative of the strength of the applicants. I've studied undergrad at both UK and US, and the schools I've studied at were almost equivalent in terms of national ranking (but the global ranking of the American one was a bit better), and I've had friends studying at Cambridge. An average undergrad student in a 2nd-tier (if you consider the top-tier to be world's top 15) school has a much more impressive CV, and academic maturity than an undergrad at a 2nd-tier uni (or maybe even top-tier, i.e. Oxbridge) in the UK. For example, a large percentage of American undergrads (at least those interested in research and academia) have substantial research experience and the vast majority do a couple of summer internships (and some even longer internships), while such a thing in the UK (at least at a non-{Oxbridge and Imperial} school) is really rare. That being said, a US undergrad could be a bit short in the depth of knowledge and information in their field of study than a UK one, if they take too many "breadth" courses, but that totally depends on the individual students and I can't comment on the average or norm. All of that means the acceptance in Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. seems to be way more difficult than Oxbridge, but if you don't care about names, that shouldn't matter to you, because you could have better achievements if you are around stronger classmates and in a more challenging environment, and in fact for PhD all that matters in the quality of your study is the group you are working with, and the resources you have access to. ( + disclaimer: I am a physical sciences student, so all that I said might be totally wrong about other fields, but it seems to me that the differences are more general and come from the system and culture, and not specific to a department or field. But I could be wrong..)