<p>^ but what is the problem with that? </p>
<p>So people go abroad, is that bad in your eyes? Ha</p>
<p>Hi Original Poster:
I think it’s great that you are able to articulate your perspective on this situation and that you are developing a list of pro’s and con’s. I’m also an academic administrator and I run a Study Abroad program at a university. </p>
<p>I’d actually like to suggest that you figure out who the Study Abroad coordinator is at the universities which your child is considering. If you’re doing college visits, ask admissions if you can have an appointment with someone in the Study Abroad office. Otherwise, call the office and ask to set up a phone appointment with someone in the Study Abroad office. Present your case just as you have here: I’m not convinced of the utility of this experience; I’m wary of the costs.</p>
<p>My sense is that there will be someone in this office who is happy to address each of your concerns one by one.<br>
Some of my initial thoughts are as follows: </p>
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<li><p>Yes, there are Study abroad programs which are actually cheaper than a semester or year of tuition at a US school. They do indeed come in many flavors. </p></li>
<li><p>Some study abroad programs may help your child with their goal of getting into grad school or finding a job. Employers see study abroad as evidence of flexibility, maturity and other skills that make people attractive employees. </p></li>
<li><p>Some schools have specific financial funds set aside for study abroad, and some will offer you a financial aid package which allows you to put those funds towards study abroad. (Here, if you go, for example, Sweetbriar and you go on their study abroad program in England or France, it’s likely you would be able to apply your financial aid to going on their program. however, if you went to Sweetbriar and you wanted to go on Middlebury’s program, then you would not. To make things even more complicated, sometimes there will be a consortium of up to twelve colleges which band together to offer a study abroad program to students from all of these schools. here too you can normally apply your school’s financial aid to the program, provided your school is part of this consortium).</p></li>
<li><p>You can use student loans for study abroad through an accredited university. perhaps you can tell your student that if she wishes to do this, it would be up to her to take out loans for this program.</p></li>
<li><p>There are also programs for working abroad, including internships. If a program which was both academicaly rigorous and led to employment is important to you, then clearly a summer spent working at a bank in China is a better fit than a semester spent shopping in paris. Here you might want to check with the careers office at your child’s school and ask about programs to work abroad. (Some US universities may have a formal program in place, for example, with a secondary school in China, where their students can compete for a chance to work there after graduating from college.)</p></li>
<li><p>Fulbright now has some summer seminars abroad for college students which are free if you are accepted. There may be other programs at your child’s school or nationally which the Study Abroad office can let you know about.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>As I said, a lot of this will vary from school to school but please do talk to someone from Study Abroad or International Programs before you write off study abroad immediately. You might just be surprised at what you learn!</p>
<p>D2 was going to study abroad with her best friend next fall, but the friend’s dad said no because she went to a boarding school in Switzerland and spent a lot of her time in Europe. He said, “You are studying abroad, in the US for 4 years.”</p>
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I can only report my own experience about how common study abroad is amongst some groups. As someone with what sounds like a foreign accent in the US, if I meet a white girl from a relatively wealthy background who is studying the humanities or social sciences, it’s only a matter of time before she tells me that she “lived in Bologna for a few months”.*</p>
<p>I daresay Italy has lost some of its appeal for young women from Seattle who share the above background.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/After-Amanda-Knox-UW-tightens-rules-for-study-885636.php[/url]”>http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/After-Amanda-Knox-UW-tightens-rules-for-study-885636.php</a></p>
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<p>I wasn’t really saying that it’s a problem (though the conversation is a bit tedious). It’s more that they all seem to think they’ve done something really special and unusual. But more and more people are coming to realise that a highly structured study abroad vacation is just not that useful:</p>
<p>[Study</a> Abroad’s New Focus Is Job Skills - Global - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/Study-Abroad-Gets-an-Image/124979/]Study”>http://chronicle.com/article/Study-Abroad-Gets-an-Image/124979/)</p>
<p>There are so many different kinds of “study abroad” experiences that it’s meaningless to lump them all together. There are some pretty empty fun-time extended trips that aren’t integrally related to the student’s major or the acquisition of a useful skill (such as fluency in a particular language). Not everyone needs to study abroad. But I don’t think it’s correct to classify all study-abroad programs as “vacations.”</p>
<p>I agree they aren’t necessarily vacations.
My youngest had that opportunity when she spent her gap year in rural India & the UK after high school. It was a volunteer vacation, 2/3 volunteer and 1/3 vacation.
In college she spent a summer in the Costa Rican jungle working on an original research with students & prof from her school.
The fastest & most reliable way in or out is by hiking. (They also apparently traveled a good bit by zipline)No roads & air traffic is dependent on weather.
It was related to her degree and while not a strict requirement, added much to her continued studies.</p>
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<p>Perhaps it should be more accurate to say that studying abroad is MORE of a vacation that attending a US school is! The process of attending --in theory-- fifteen hours of classroom a week could be considered a leisurely life. And, considering the attention paid by the schools to develop the “leisure” aspects of the school much faster than its academics, it is a message received loud and clear. </p>
<p>As it stands, most programs in Europe do not really care much about the attendance of its students, and do not rely much on homework. At best a couple of midterms and a final will do in most cases. The programs that were deliberately built for foreigners might be a bit different to ensure that the students would not simply fly from one weekend in Prague to the next in Lisbon! </p>
<p>Vacation or not, let’s be realistic about the reason why study abroad remains popular with the population at large. And, it ain’t for advanced academics or tough as nail programs; it is because of the possibility to “find itself” through travel. Or something along those silly lines. </p>
<p>Some programs are no-frills and advanced. Studying math is Hungary or physics in Germany is not for the faintest of hearts, but those are … exceptions. The organized vacation … not so much of an exception!</p>
<p>Xiggi, I always respect your posts so much but in the interests of hyperbole you are really being irritating. Some programs abroad are a joke; some programs have weak academic standards; some programs allow kids to basically coast for a semester and have fun traveling on weekends. Let me stipulate that virtually every poster here agrees with you that SOME programs are like this.</p>
<p>That’s a far stretch from your comment that studying abroad is more of a vacation than staying in the US. There are weak academic programs in America (I know at least a dozen kids enrolled in them now) where winter break rolls into spring break and where “group projects” is a code word for “let’s get together with our friends at night and pretend to be learning something”. That doesn’t mean that nobody in the US studies hard or learns anything in college- just that kids who pick programs with low academic standards won’t end up learning as much or working as hard as kids who pick programs with high standards. Duh.</p>
<p>Neighbor of mine just made the undergrad business school honor society. His mom is so proud. You need a B average to make it- yawn. This from a program which gives academic credit for his summer “internship” last year where he answered the phone and xeroxed maps at a local real estate brokerage firm.</p>
<p>But I’m not ready to claim that everyone at his university (over 10,000 students) is on permanent vacation. And you should dial back your comments about “organized vacation”. There are lots of colleges in the US that are very leery of giving credit from a foreign institution- and kids who are able to get it, have to prove mastery of the material, take exams, submit papers, etc. in order to do it. Those kids most certainly have not been phoning it in from a cafe in Prague.</p>
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<p>Physics and math are going to be rigorous no matter what country and language. Listening to an econ or history or literature lecture in a foreign language, and then having to write papers for the class in said language isn’t for the “faintest of hearts” either.</p>
<p>One might argue that having to write essays about history and literature in a foreign language is more challenging than taking math or physics. A p-set is a p-set, but expressing complex, syntactically correct arguments in a language you are struggling to learn is another.</p>
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<p>and probably, except for ultra-rare exceptions to the rule, totally impossible. I am always floored to hear pretending to having gained quasi fluency after spending a semester or year abroad, or a after a few years of high school or a couple of semester of language classes at college. Unless someone has years of extensive training, I think that expressing complex, syntactically correct arguments in a foreign language is well beyond the struggling student abroad. It would wonderful if one returns with a passable understanding of the passive part of the language, namely the reading and listening understanding. The spoken and written part … highly improbable. </p>
<p>Same for **writing an essay **in the foreign language versus ordering the right drink at the local Starbucks. The first one being quite the impossible task.</p>
<p>People use “fluent” differently. In America it means something like “can have a basic conversation without grasping for words”. In Britain it means “completely able to function in the language at near-native levels”. What Americans might call “proficient.”</p>
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<p>AT the risk of being more irritating, I’d like you to note that I answered to a precise sentence that declared “Studying abroad is NOT a vacation.” From my initial post on this subject, I have share my opinion that the programs come in all shapes and flavors. I recognize that some are hardly a walk in the park. Others are, however, built to be the easy cash cows for the host schools and work well when exchanging a semblance of education for plenty of outside activities. I guess that is the part we all agree on, or hopefully.</p>
<p>I also wrote that the value of the study programs are (inversely) proportional to the selectivity and difficulty of programs in the US. Obviously, I never said that ALL schools in the US are easier or harder, or more or less fun. Again, I answered to an absolute statement that I felt was incorrect. I did not write an absolute statement sounding such as " All programs are …"</p>
<p>In conclusion, let me restate that not all programs are one and the same. Neither or abroad. Not all study programs are mostly vacations; Some are! </p>
<p>If the irritating part is that I view the overwhelming majority of the study abroad as overrrated and underdelivering, so be it. I am not trying to convince anyone to share my opinion, and I gladly recognize that the experiences of others might easily debunk my opinions. </p>
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<p>Isn’t that what I wrote about the pitfalls of the study abroad programs? I addressed the lack of credit for lower courses and the loss of housing preferences. Is my use of the term organized vacation not a reasonable correlation with the … leeriness of colleges to grant credit for studies at the “fun” programs that consist of “Introduction to XYZ” ? If the programs abroad were tougher or more advanced, the schools should NOT be leery of granting credit. Yet they are … as you wrote.</p>
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<p>I don’t know why you would say this. Even the knuckledragging Neantherthal Americans define proficiency as one step lower than fluency. Of course neither British nor Americans are particularly internationally renowned for proficiency or fluency in foreign languages.</p>
<p>Xiggi- I wasn’t clear. Universities which have strict policies about accepting work at other institutions for credit (AP, transfer, summer study, etc.) tend to have rigorous academic standards. The fact that study abroad credits are subject to the same screens as credits from any other institution doesn’t mean that the university views the foreign programs as suspect per se… just that standards are standards. </p>
<p>Folks on CC like to complain about colleges which don’t accept AP credits, won’t give credit for organic chemistry taken at a directional state U during the summer, etc. But that’s how a university protects the integrity of its degree programs.</p>
<p>So my point was that universities which subject foreign programs to scrutiny- rather than saying, “we give a semester’s credit for any program abroad” are likely to act as a reassuring filter, so that the OP’s D (and anyone else) doesn’t end up in a watered down, fun travelogue devoid of academic content.</p>
<p>Blosson, I do not disagree with anything in the above post. And I believe that the schools that are cautious with the credits you outline are not exactly an overwhelming majority in the US. Again, I do not doubt that there are hard foreign programs.</p>
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<p>What do you mean by knuckledragging Neanderthals? I wasn’t criticising any country or its people so let’s not turn this into any kind of nationalist argument. I wasn’t saying that either usage was right or wrong, just different.</p>
<p>But you do (at least, I do) often hear Americans saying, sometimes on this forum, that their child went abroad for a semester or a year and “came back fluent”. At least by the British usage of that term, it means their child is a linguistic genius who is probably about to get hired by the NSA.</p>
<p>Irony, you know. That concept that Americans supposedly don’t get.</p>
<p>OP - It’s a good topic. And I have some examples from my own research. </p>
<p>Northeastern(Boston): Due to their co-op program, many elective are take during the summer. Many students opt to do them through semester abroad Dialog program. For these programs, it seems that only tuition is charged (room/board and airfare is somehow built into the tuition charge. ) That makes it cheaper to study in Rome than in Boston. </p>
<p>Direct Exchange example - DS just arrived in Singapore for a direct exchange program. I paid his tuition to the home college. The room is $1800/semester (vs $4500 on his home campus). Food will be cheap, likely a lot less than the $3000/semester on home campus. He didn’t embark on this adventure to save us money. But after paying for airfare we will still be ahead financially.</p>
<p>Other exchange programs - We also looked into other programs, like Butler. For us it would have been slightly more expensive, but that is only because we are comparing to a half tuition scholarship at home.</p>