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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Glorified tourism in almost all cases. Better off spending college learning and then do a 2-3 year stint abroad after school - teaching English, Fulbright, etc...[/quote]

The actual going abroad part can be fantastic, but the fees and credit workarounds schools impose on students are too much.  If your child took the money they would have used to study abroad and pooled together with 2-3 friends doing the same, they could live very well in Europe/Asia for the same amount of time as a college study abroad program, not worry about classes and definitely enjoy the international experience on a grander scale! :)[/quote]

My year abroad didn't cost any more than if I had stayed at home that year, other than the airplane ticket and some of the traveling I did during holidays.

[/quote]

It depends on the study abroad program.  My college had "exchange" agreements with several universities, where your tuition dollars would be used to cover the cost of studying abroad (and the person from the university abroad would use their tuition fees to study in the US).  [b]However, if you went outside of these university partnerships (which were limited, maybe 10-12 total partnerships, with 2-3 of those taking place only in the summer term), prices were staggering [/b]-- for instance, going to Oxford for a year cost $52k!  You could complete 2/3 of your years at Oxford as an American/overseas undergrad for the same price.  And that's only the "program fees" before accounting for plane tickets, spending money, etc.[/quote]

Well, yes.  That is also true in the United States - if you went to e.g. Harvard instead of UMD or the SLAC where you got merit aid, it would cost more.

So what?[/quote]

I think you misunderstood -- if you're at Harvard/UMD/a SLAC and they have a partnership agreement with, say, LSE, you'd pay your regular old tuition to go abroad (and the kid from LSE would pay his regular tuition to study at one of the aforementioned American schools for a year).  If, instead, you wanted to go to Cambridge from Harvard/UMBD/a SLAC and your university did NOT have a partnership agreement with Cambridge, you'd end up paying much more than your tuition to study abroad.  My tuition was ~$25k/year at my state school so I thought it was crazy to pay my university $52k/year (plus an application fee) to study abroad at Oxford when I could study at Oxford as a real student, and not a study abroad student, for a fraction of the cost/year.

I'd rather my kid take the $52k, enroll at Oxford as a non-degree student if that was his desire and use the remainder of the money to travel/live in a nice apartment while there/etc.  Or just use the $52k to live in Europe for a year without the formal study abroad program; they money would go much further, IMO.[/quote]

No, I understood perfectly.  My point is, why do you feel the need to study with a partner program that is not connected to your home school?  Why spend the $52K at all?

FWIW, when I studied abroad a million years ago, my expensive private school at home charged me zero, and the university I attended in Europe (through a different, also private home school partnership) charged a small fraction of what my home school tuition would have been - so much so that my year abroad cost half of what it would have cost, had I studied at my home school in the U.S.[/quote]

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