I don’t usually do this, but I am guessing the foreign university is ETH Zurich. STEM focussed, language instruction mostly in English. Learning Swiss-German is not exactly the most useful of foreign languages!
To the general question - do parents know best? Maybe. I suggested schools to my kids, but I did let them make the ultimated decision. My parents strongly suggested to me and my two siblings that we take a gap year learning a foreign language before starting college. It’s not something I would ever have done on my own, as I was a miserable language student in high school. It was a fabulous decision. Not only did I learn to speak French fluently, but it turned out that once I had one language under my belt it was easier to learn other ones, even non-Romance languages. I ended up being able to do research for my senior thesis in France and Germany thanks to that initial push by my parents.