What high school research programmes cost in 2027

Price is the first question almost every parent asks and the last one most programmes answer.

Several providers do not publish a figure at all — you request a call, and the number arrives after someone has assessed how much you are likely to pay. Almost none publish how selective they are, which is the number that determines whether the price means anything.

Here is the whole market as far as it can be verified from public sources, including us.

What do the main research programmes charge?

Figures below come from each provider's own website, checked September 2026. Currency as published.

A warning about that middle column

Read it carefully, because the pattern in it is the most useful thing on this page.

Almost nobody publishes an acceptance rate. Not the free university programmes, not the expensive residential ones, and not the online mentorships. RSI, Beaver Works, SIMR and UCSB RMP all describe themselves as competitive without saying how competitive. Pioneer, Polygence and Immerse say nothing at all.

Where a selectivity figure does exist for an online programme, it is self-reported. Including ours. No external body audits these numbers, no regulator checks them, and there is no standard definition of what counts as an application — whether an enquiry, a started form, or a completed submission with references. A programme claiming a 20% acceptance rate and a programme claiming 60% may be measuring entirely different things.

Treat every selectivity claim in this market, ours included, as marketing until someone shows you the denominator.

We publish ours anyway, and it is not flattering. About 60% of applicants to OCAR are accepted. We are not a selective programme in the sense that RSI is, and we do not pretend to be. What we screen for is whether a student has the English, the subject grounding and the four to six hours a week to finish — not whether they are among the hundred strongest applicants on earth. If selectivity is what you are buying, buy it from the free programmes below, where it is real.

The free and near-free programmes worth trying first

Four programmes cost little or nothing and are more selective than anything you can buy. If your student is competitive for one, apply there before paying anyone.

Research Science Institute (RSI). Free — "cost-free to students," per the Center for Excellence in Education. About 100 students a year at MIT: one week of intensive STEM classes, five weeks of research, a final week of written and oral reports. Open to students in the year equivalent to UK Year 12. Nothing you can buy is better.

MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute. Free for qualifying families; $2,400 for families with income and assets of $200,000 or more. Four weeks in July, in advanced programming and engineering. Restricted to students residing in and attending high school in the United States, in a grade no higher than 11th. Corporate sponsorship covers the teaching, which is why the price is what it is.

Stanford Institutes of Medicine Summer Research Program (SIMR). A $50 application fee, waived if family income is under $80,000, and no cost at all if selected. Around 50 students. Restricted to US citizens and permanent residents currently living in and attending high school in the US, aged 16+, and the selection process "will strongly favor local students due to various grant requirements."

UCSB Research Mentorship Program. The exception in this group: $5,675 as a commuter, $13,274 residential, which makes it the most expensive programme on this page. It runs six and a half weeks at UC Santa Barbara, requires a 3.80 weighted GPA and 10th or 11th grade standing, and is open internationally, with no TOEFL requirement. A limited number of need-based scholarships exist, prioritised for California residents.

Three of those four are closed to students who do not live in the United States. That single fact explains most of the demand for paid online mentorship, and it is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up: for an international student, the free tier is largely unavailable.

Why does the same product cost £2,000 in one place and $13,274 in another?

Five things drive the spread, and only two are about the student.

Whether anyone else is paying. RSI, Beaver Works and SIMR are underwritten by universities, foundations and corporate sponsors. Their price reflects a subsidy, not a cheaper product. Once that subsidy is absent, someone has to pay the researcher's time.

Residential costs. UCSB's £-equivalent gap between commuter and residential is $7,599, all of it housing and meals. That is not research; it is a summer in California. Decide separately whether you are buying it.

Mentor seniority. A PhD candidate costs less than a postdoc, who costs less than a professor. Pioneer's premium is largely this — every mentor is a professor, and it says so. Whether a seventeen-year-old's first research project needs a professor rather than a fourth-year doctoral student doing this work daily is a real question, and reasonable people answer it differently.

Contact hours. The honest comparator, and almost nobody presents it. Immerse's £2,695 tier buys ten hours. Polygence's Core is ten one-hour sessions. Our Scholar Programme is ten contact hours. Divide before you conclude anything.

Accreditation. Pioneer's fee includes four transferable college credits through partnerships with Oberlin College and UNC–Chapel Hill. That is a real, externally validated thing, and expensive to provide. If US college credit matters, it changes the calculation. If your student is applying through UCAS, it does very little.

What is the actual hourly rate?

Worth doing on the back of an envelope before any sales call.

Polygence's $300 an hour sits above £200 at any exchange rate below $1.50 to the pound, so on a like-for-like basis our Scholar Programme is the cheapest 1:1 hour in the table. We would rather you noticed that from the arithmetic than from us asserting it.

Two cautions, because this table is easy to over-read.

Contact hours are not the whole product. Mentors prepare, read drafts between sessions, and write references, none of which appears in a session count. And a cheap hour with a mentor who is a poor fit for the subject is worse value than an expensive hour with the right person.

But it does expose one thing. Most of this market prices 1:1 academic mentorship between roughly £200 and £300 an hour. Where a programme quotes a much higher total, ask what the extra buys — usually accreditation, mentor seniority, duration or accommodation, any of which may be worth it. If nobody can tell you which, that is your answer.

What are the free and cheap alternatives?

This section costs us money to write and it belongs here anyway.

Beyond the four programmes above, three routes cost nothing:

Nuffield Research Placements put UK students into real research environments over the summer at no cost, and Cambridge's Computer Science department lists them explicitly as super-curricular activity it values.

Cold-emailing academics. Free, and it works more often than students expect — particularly at universities outside the top handful, where staff receive fewer such emails. Twenty carefully personalised emails to researchers whose recent papers the student has actually read will typically produce one or two replies. Told well in a personal statement, that story is stronger than most paid programmes deliver, because it demonstrates initiative that cannot be purchased.

Your own school. An EPQ or an IB Extended Essay is a supervised independent research project you are already paying for through school fees or taxes. A well-executed EPQ, taken seriously, does much of what a paid programme does.

Paid mentorship earns its fee in a specific situation: the student has the ability and the appetite, but no access to a research environment, no adult nearby who has run a study, and not enough time to reverse-engineer the process alone. For international students, who are locked out of most of the free tier, that situation is common. It is not universal.

Where OCAR sits, and who should not choose us

Two programmes, both published, both all-inclusive, with no journal fees concealed inside them.

The Oxford Scholar Programme is £2,000 for ten to fourteen weeks of 1:1 mentorship, ending in a research paper of roughly 4,000–8,000 words with an abstract, literature review, methodology, original analysis and bibliography. Expect four to six hours a week. Payment is one instalment, two of £1,000, or four monthly instalments of £500, and the plans are interest-free — worth noting against Polygence's stated 8% surcharge for paying over six months.

The Oxford Publication Fellowship is £3,400 over sixteen to twenty weeks, at six to eight hours a week. It adds publication strategy sessions, submission preparation and additional mentor meetings, and ends with a manuscript formatted to a target journal's guidelines and a submission logged with that journal.

All our mentors are PhD candidates at Oxford, Cambridge, Ivy League universities or other leading UK institutions, actively working in their fields. Partial scholarships are available on the basis of financial need — ask when you apply rather than assuming there is nothing.

We are the wrong choice if:

• your student is competitive for RSI, Beaver Works or SIMR, and eligible for them. Those are free, more selective, and better;
• you need US college credit, in which case Pioneer's accreditation is a real advantage we do not offer;
• you want the residential experience, which we do not provide at any price;
• your student is in Year 10 and has not yet done enough subject work to frame a question worth ten weeks of their time;
• you want a guaranteed publication, which we will not offer and would not trust anyone who did.

Frequently asked questions

Is a more expensive research programme better?

Not reliably. Price tracks subsidy, accommodation, mentor seniority and accreditation rather than the quality of a student's experience. The most expensive option on this page costs more than six times our Scholar Programme, and a good part of that difference is housing and meals in Santa Barbara.

Which research programmes are free?

RSI is free outright. Stanford SIMR costs a $50 application fee and nothing further if you are selected. MIT Beaver Works is free for qualifying families and $2,400 for families with income and assets above $200,000. All three are restricted to students in the United States or, in RSI's case, heavily oversubscribed. Nuffield Research Placements are free for UK students.

Are there scholarships for paid research programmes?

Some, and they are rarely advertised. Pioneer states it dedicates funds annually to need-based scholarships. UCSB offers a limited number, prioritised for California residents. We offer partial scholarships on the basis of financial need. Ask directly rather than assuming there is nothing.

Do programme fees include the cost of publishing?

Usually not. Journal fees are separate and typically $0–$350 depending on the venue. Ours are all-inclusive. Ask any programme to confirm in writing what is and is not included before you pay.

How selective are online research programmes really?

Nobody knows, because almost none publish the figure and none are externally audited. We publish ours — about 60% — which is not selective, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. If you are told a programme accepts 5% of applicants, ask what counts as an applicant.

Is it worth paying for research if we cannot afford the top-tier programmes?

A well-supervised EPQ, a Nuffield placement, or a self-arranged project with a local academic can produce work that reads just as well to an admissions tutor. Oxford's guidance is that tutors want to see how deeply you have engaged with your subject; it says nothing about how much the engagement cost. Do not go into debt for this.