[DanaC]

Depends where you go , but the UK is fairly cheap compared with many places. Don't know if there are any financial assistance programmes for foreign students, but worth checking out. If you do, I'd suggest going for something in the North of the country(possibly even Scotland, though thinking abotu it Wales is also very good as an option): even though the weather's usually worse, the cost of living is significantly less (the difference in rent alone is vast).

If you are considering the UK, then you could do a lot worse than checking out the Times Online league tables. My own university is the University of Leeds in West Yorkshire. They have a lot of foerign studens, including quite a few Americans.

Manchester, Leeds, York, Newcastle. All of these Northern cities have excellent universities. A word of advice though: any university with the word 'Metropolitan' in it's name is an old polytechnic college which has been converted into a university in the education shake up. Genernally speaking, they are better at things like inclusion policies and catering to less traditonal groups of studens and are often quite good on some of the more modern disciplines (like computer sciences) but for the more traditional academic subjects they are not as good. Now, that's just an opinion, but it's held by a lot of people and a lot of employers. A 1st from the University of Leeds gains more points with an employer than a 1st from Leeds Metropolitian University.