Every August, a quiet transformation takes place in Oxford. The undergraduates are gone, the colleges have exhaled, and in their place arrive young students from Mumbai, Delhi, Lagos, and Seoul, cycling along the Cherwell, debating ideas in wood-panelled seminar rooms, and doing something that would otherwise remain entirely out of reach for most of them: living, however briefly, as an Oxford student.
Summer schools in Britain's great university towns have become a serious fixture in the calendars of ambitious Indian teenagers. What parents once viewed as an expensive extravagance is now widely seen as a meaningful investment. Oxford and Cambridge lead the list of destinations, but programmes in St Andrews, Durham, and several American university towns have also grown substantially. The reason is straightforward. The University of Oxford admits a tiny fraction of those who apply from across the world. A summer school is, for most students, the closest they will come to experiencing what life inside those colleges actually feels like.
