In 2000, I moved to the US with my wife and two children to take up a research job here – becoming part of the migration of science, technology and engineering expertise out of the UK.  Eleven years on, my kids want to go back to the UK to university.  But the costs of re-entry are proving to be a major obstacle.  And I have to wonder whether this disincentive for students to return to the UK is preventing a flow of expertise back into the British knowledge economy – effectively a second generation brain drain.

I was privileged to be amongst the last generation in the UK to have the cost of my university education completely covered.  Those three years studying physics – not because it was financially lucrative, but because it opened up an incredible new world of awareness and insight – have influenced deeply everything I have achieved since. Even as fees began to creep in and student grants were cut from the late 1980’s on, I believed that the relatively low cost of admission to higher education in Britain was critical to investing in a strong, sustainable society.  And like many Brits, I learned to look with distain on the money-driven US education market, where students (we were told) studied to make money, and invariably graduated with debts that beggared belief.

So it’s rather ironic that I now discover it will probably cost us more to send both our children to UK institutions than to universities in the United States.

Because we as a family will not have been resident in the UK for the three years leading up to my kids entering college, they will have to pay international tuition fees. For somewhere like Bristol University for instance, the 2011/12 tuition fees for a science-based subject are £15,550 ($25,640).  For in-state tuition at the University of Michigan (our local state University), the comparable tuition fees are around $14,000 (£8,500).  At Michigan State – just down the road – the tuition fees are around $12,000 (£7,300).

Things look a little different if you go out of state or head to a top private university.  The University of Michigan out of state fees for 2011/12 are over $40,000 (£24,000), and Michigan State around $29,000 (£17,500).  If you head for somewhere like MIT, you are also looking at around $40,000 (£24,000) per year for tuition.

In other words, paying full in-state tuition fees and going out of state or private in the US costs less per year than sending my kids back to a British red brick university.  Going out of state or private is still more than going back to the UK (although not by as much as you might imagine). And going in-state (noting that the University of Michigan was ranked 15th in the world in 2010 by QS), we would even be paying less in tuition than British families sending their kids to a british university in 2012.*

That shocks me profoundly.

But the real shocker is that here in the US, we have the chance to curb those US fees through scholarships. And they are surprisingly numerous!  Finding an organization to cover all your tuition fees may just be for the best students, but there are plenty of opportunities to have them partially covered. Meaning that even sending our kids to somewhere like MIT, we could be looking at the equivalent of £10,000 – £15,000 per year. With scholarships, even going out of state or private compares favorably to paying international UK university tuition fees.*

As UK citizens living in the US, we don’t have the same options when applying for universities in the UK.  Which means that we are stuck with paying £25,000+ per year.

In other words, there is a huge financial barrier to our two children returning to the UK to study and work, and an equally large incentive for them to stay here in the States.  It’s a second generation brain drain – these kids can’t get back into the UK knowledge economy, even when they want to!

Part of the problem it seems is that education in the UK is still seen as a personal privilege rather than a social investment.  It’s a divisive bit of misguided thinking that devalues the importance of education to sustainable social and economic growth, and presents a significant hurdle to future British prosperity.  And it is preventing students who want to be a part of that society and ultimately contribute to its growth from doing so.

I live in hope that the UK government will come to realize the importance of attracting overseas kids back to the UK, and will at least allow them to pay domestic tuition fees.  In the long-term it’s a no-brainer in terms of boosting the knowledge economy – even though those domestic fees are shamefully high.  If they don’t, I’m afraid there may well be two more casualties of the second generation brain drain in a year or so’s time.

*Update 2:20 PM 8/20/11.  In the first edition of this piece I got embarrassingly mixed up between $ and £, leading to some dubious claims!  These have now been corrected.