Reply to Are We Crazy for Questioning a $250k US Degree and looking abroad?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It makes sense if one of the reasons for doing it is to broaden the kid’s experience by living abroad or some other similar reason (e.g., learning a foreign language).

It makes very little sense if it’s purely to save money. Yes, these foreign schools have a sticker price that’s a fraction of the sticker price of an American private school. But dig deeper & you will find the foreign schools have expensive transportation costs, crappy living conditions (most foreign universities think undergrads should live in hovels), pressure-filled degree programs (everything’s based on a few major exams), & isolated social lives (often not a lot of locals are eager to be buddies with Americans). (None of these drawbacks really apply to Canadian universities, which aren’t all that different from schools in the US.)

If the goal is just to save money, I’d recommend your in-state publics or a solid American public university in another state that has a low sticker price & gives good merit aid to bring the net price down significantly (Arizona, Kansas, Florida State, Nebraska etc).

—American who attended universities in US, Canada, & Scotland [/quote]

kids want to go abroad for a variety of reasons. None of it is related to being cheaper.  My husband doesnt care. I’m the one who brought up cost being an additional factor (for my little brain) to consider.

Other than my husband, my only other reference point here is son of a colleague who went to Bocconi for undergrad. Yes, they saved a TON of money for a pretty decent degree. He did not have expensive transportation costs or crappy living conditions. His dorm was actually amazing and his social life was great. So not sure where you went to school, but my point is that it is tough to generalize (American is amazing, everything else is terrible). My kids do not want to stay in-state. Our in-state options are not great (we dont live in DC). [/quote]

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