Study advice requested for Oxbridge

Hello,

My name is Adriaan, and I'm a Dutch high school student. In 1,5 year I will have finished my high school and after that, the plans are to continue study at a university. I really want to study abroad to discover a new country and culture, but high quality education is important for me as well. This basically left me with the UK and the USA. Between these, I preferred the UK.
With my bachelor I hope to achieve to goal of getting a better understanding of the human world around us. But here is where it becomes difficult, as I don't know whether I should apply for history, philosophy, history & politics, PPE or HSPS. I am not so interested in the biology side of humanistic studies. The only thing I really know is that I want to understand the world and get a global idea of what is happening, why those things are happening, what effect they have and how to think about them. Which bachelor do you guys think I should apply to in order to achieve that? I realise that this is a quite a vague question, but it really has bothering me lately. Thanks in advance!

They're all fine for your purposes - there shouldn't be any biology in any of the first four, and what little biology is still in HSPS can be easily avoided with subject choices.

Reading between the lines slightly, I'd recommend avoiding straight philosophy unless you already know you have an interest in that particular field - I suspect you'd be frustrated with the theoretical nature. As for the rest, have a look on the websites of the universities you're thinking of applying to (remembering that you can only apply for one of Oxford and Cambridge, and that you'll want to apply for some other places because getting into Oxbridge is not a dead cert for anyone) and see what appeals from the descriptions on there. Try to pick five reasonably well-aligned courses (e.g. all history, or all politics and economics, etc.) because otherwise writing the personal statement will be very tricky. Good luck!

Thanks for your response, I think you are right regarding philosophy, I indeed prefer something a bit more concrete. I also looked at Combined honours at durham, which I think is a great bachelor as well. Because of the preference of a more concrete degree, I though law could be interesting as well, do you happen to have any experience with that?

HSPS misses the history component in my opinion, or does anthropology include history?

I think you're right - I'm not sure that there is any significant component of history (I think you can do economic history in Year 1, and there might be a bit more later on, but I don't think there's much that's significant.) You might want to look into Law more, because a lot of people find it a bit dry and not actually all that relevant to the real world. (Especially at Cambridge, where the course is extremely heavy.)

It sounds like Modern History and Politics would probably be the best Oxbridge combination for you, from what I've heard, and would probably fit reasonably well with other courses at other universities so your application is coherent.