Study Abroad Jr Year - Do the Pros outweigh the Cons?

Applying to College
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Our daughter has been accepted to SYA’s high school year abroad program (Spain), and talking to college counselors, it’s unclear if the pros in going outweigh the cons.

While it is a tremendous opportunity to show her independence and adaptability, she’ll learn about other cultures and people, and it will provide a great topic for essays and interviews, she has to give up all 6 of her AP/honors classes she’d be taking next year since the abroad program doesn’t offer AP classes.

Our concern is that our research indicates that many schools, because of the sheer volume of applications they receive, initially filter their applicants on overall (AP boosted) GPAs, before actually individually reviewing the applications of the highest performing applicants. And our worry is that because our daughter won’t have all those junior year AP classes, she may be filtered out of consideration before an admission officers even gets the chance to zero in on her application and notice her study abroad. We’ve also been told, the larger the school, the more likely this might happen.

Our school counselor has tried to push the program (since I think it’s good for the school), but kids who attended in previous years didn’t end up at particularly difficult schools to get in, so we can’t tell if it helped or hurt their applications.

Any insights or experiences with these types of programs would be appreciated. Or, if anyone works (or worked) in an admission office, and can provide their opinion/perspective, that would also help.
Thanks so much!!

https:// www.sya. org/programs/sya-spain

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Not sure where you are getting this. Some very good schools offer no/few AP classes. It is important to remember that AP is a brand and IMO one that is devaluating its value. Just because a class doesn’t have the AP trademark attached doesn’t mean it is rigorous.

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It is so wrong, but I think you are right.

First of all, there are other programs that would be of more benefit to her. This is a program where she would not be in a Spanish high school. She would be studying together with other US students on this program. Of course, living with the Spanish host family will help, but she would be better off doing an exchange program, whether formal or informal, where she attends a Spanish high school with Spanish teenagers.

If she’s planning on applying to highly competitive schools, I do think that compiling a record in junior year is highly relevant. Yet a high school junior year in a foreign country, speaking a foreign language, is tremendously valuable. Speaking English with other US students? Not so much…

Three other options: Spend the entire summer living in Spain with a Spanish family, speaking Spanish, and do junior year in her regular school. Maybe go back again for the entire summer before senior year, too. Or do a gap year abroad between high school and college (less desirable, because the difference in foreign language acquisition ability between age 16 vs age 18 is significant). Or take a year off between 10th and 11th grade, going to a foreign country for a year of school there in a foreign school and living with a foreign host family, and come back and do 11th and 12th in the US, maybe going back for the summers to keep her language skill up.

If she’s planning on tippy-top private schools, I think that they would give individual consideration to each application, and not dismiss her application because she doesn’t have AP classes in 11th grade, especially if she had been a straight A student in all honors classes, plus has an extremely high SAT/ACT, plus gets a 5 on the Spanish AP exam in May of her junior year, plus registers for a challenging load of all AP classes in senior year. But I do think that it might be a problem to overcome, when compared to a kid who has a bunch of high grades in AP classes from junior year.

The best option would be for her to have both, by spending the summers in Spain, living with a Spanish speaking family, for the summers before 11th and 12th grades, so that she’d have both fluency in Spanish, and a junior year academic record.

As for the SYA program vs an AFS-exchange program, I can tell you that my kid who is applying now for jobs is considered qualified because kid didn’t do US programs in the foreign country, but instead lived and studied entirely in the foreign language. Didn’t speak a word of English while kid was there. Employer was ONLY interested in kid because of that. Said that those who had done US sponsored “Let’s all go to foreign country and study there together” type programs could not perform in the target language.

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I can say without reservation that studying abroad changed the whole course of my life. I was a junior in college, but not much different from high school, except more alcohol, haha. I’ve worked with a few kids who studied abroad for a year in high school, one was in Japan, two others in Europe, another in Israel. All of them loved their experience.

Does she want to do it? Is it THAT important to sacrifice fun and what might be a life changing experience for a great big maybe?

I honestly don’t think giving up life’s pleasures in pursuit of prestige is worth it. If anything, this past year should help people realize that life is short and we should get our enlightening experiences while we can.

I have never once in my life thought “I sure wish I had taken more APs in high school so I could have maybe applied to Yale, instead of attending CSULB and having a happy life and career.” My instinct is to let your daughter decide if the big maybe is worth missing out on a possibly life changing experience. And sure, maybe Yale will work out and lead to a happy life and career, but at what price?

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I believe that SYA will absolutely help your daughter in the college process. There are many, many kids who stack up AP classes junior year but very few who are brave enough to take the risk of leaving their high school to study in Spain for the year.

The SYA program is rigorous and the students come back fluent but also with incredible knowledge and deep cultural understanding. They learn about the history, art history, government etc of the country. And all while staying on track with math and English. And most kids will take a few APs (usually English and Spanish and maybe math).

My son also ran with a cross country team after school and made many Spanish friends that way. And through his host family. Yes, they are not in a Spanish school but they have the best of both worlds - they stay on track with their home HS and the are immersed in life in Spain.

My son participated in the program last year as a junior and I am happy to answer any other questions. He is still waiting on some college decisions but had already been accepted to some top schools.

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Thank you for your reply…
I agree with you 100%, but “weighted” GPAs incorporate AP & Honors classes, and like it or not, some schools take them into account. Our school is moving away from AP classes, and instead calling them “Honors” since they don’t want to teach to the test. But regardless, my daughter will be forgoing 6 of those classes if she goes abroad.

My wife and I both believe foreign study is very valuable, (and we’ll encourage her to do it in college if she doesn’t do it now), but it’s definitely not worth doing now if from a college admission standpoint, it’s a net negative (cons outweigh the pros).

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“it’s definitely not worth doing now if from a college admission standpoint, it’s a net negative (cons outweigh the pros).”

But it’s your daughter doing it, not you. Why even let her contemplate it if you’re making these decisions for her?

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…and was the plan for her to take 6 APs in a year? That is not a great strategy for getting straight A’s. No point taking APs and not getting highs grades in them.

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I think the question she needs to be asking is will the curriculum be considered rigorous by colleges and her Guidance Counselor. It doesn’t matter what the class is called. Don’t underestimate colleges ability to understand “weird” transcripts. I would have her ask her GC how this would impact their evaluation of course rigor.

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A high school program that costs over $60k for the year is unlikely to impress college admissions officers. Did they really need to include the fancy NE private school testimonials on the website?

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Exactly! Far better to do an AFS exchange type program where you live a school year with a family in another country, going to local school in that country, at a fraction of the cost.

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I did SYA Spain my junior year in 1994 and loved it, I went on to Cornell. It is an amazing program and I think they’ve improved it tons overs the years. Feel free to PM me!

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It is very hard to know what impact study abroad in high school will have on university admissions.

We have a daughter who studied abroad for one semester in high school. She was accepted into every university that she applied to. However, she did not apply to any that we would have called a reach. We live in the US but have dual US/Canadian citizenship, and for a variety of reasons she only applied to universities in Canada. Given her grades and references and test scores every university in Canada was a safety, so we never got to see whether she would have gotten into something that in the US would have been a reach.

However, her study abroad experience was really good. She came home more confident and happier than we had ever seen her (and essentially bilingual). She stayed with a family that had a daughter the same age, who then came to live with us for a semester. When the other daughter left the two of them were hugging each other and calling each other sister (but in Spanish).

If we had it to do over again, we definitely would do it again.

I have consistently felt that students should do what is right for them, ignore the impact on university admissions, then apply to universities that make sense for them, and attend a university that likes whatever they did. This has at least worked for us so far.

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At least in 1994, we took only English and Math in English, otherwise everything was in Spanish and I lived with a Spanish family. I only spoke Spanish outside of my 2 English speaking classes, but your child should make an effort to hang out with Spanish friends outside of school and not Americans from school. I went in after only 2 years of Spanish and was able to score 5s on both Spanish language and literature APs and spoke the language fluently.

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A primary benefit of studying abroad for a year during high school is to learn to understand and appreciate different perspectives.

With respect to academics, it depends upon how one values foreign language proficiency versus a myriad of AP courses.

A reasonable argument can be made that study abroad is the opposite of studying multiple AP courses as one opens up the mind to different perspectives while the other stresses conformity.

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Depending on what courses they choose, many SYA Spain students take the AP exams for calc, English Lang and /or Lit, and Spanish Lang and/or Lit and do quite well. This is not dissimilar to students at many boarding schools which have eliminated AP-labeled courses.

There are minuses to SYA, including cost and fitting in HS graduation requirements since there are no lab sciences nor USH at SYA, but the lack of AP courses is not one of them. No college will ding an applicant for that.

Also the vast majority of SYA students are coming from high schools that do not weight courses. Again, a non-issue for college admissions.

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When I did it (25 years ago), there was no science option, but all of our classes counted for credit at our US schools. My English teacher was from Andover. We took English & math in English and Spanish/European history, Spanish language and Spanish literature in Spanish. We took the APs at the end of the school year. I think there are more options now for sports, ecs, etc. I thought becoming fluent in a language was invaluable and really helped with my college apps.

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What did you decide?

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However, for many high schools, AP courses are the “most demanding” course options. Most students do not attend elite high schools that have “better than AP” courses that are recognized as such by college admissions readers.

For the OP’s question, what courses would be taken in the abroad program, and how would they compare in rigor to what the student would otherwise take? Since most courses in the program (other than English and math) are in Spanish, it is likely that the student will get better at Spanish than in a US high school (presumably, the student needs to have some skill at Spanish beforehand). But check on the other courses’ content and rigor and how they compare to those that would otherwise be taken.

The other thing is that the cost of $60,900 is a significant amount of money that could otherwise be used to help pay for college.

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OP here - Ultimately the decision was out of our hands. We applied for financial aid, and didn’t receive it. Given the delta b/n SYAs tuition, and our current school’s tuition, it just wasn’t doable. She will definitely study abroad when in college.

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