Schools can extend FA to cover study away. Not sure why you think different decision making applies for kids on large fin aid. The generous colleges want to see as many get the opportunity as can benefit.
@lookingforward I can see a hypothetical situation where parent says I’ll pay 30K for you to go to state flagship and you can study abroad but if I pay 70K for private I don’t want you to study abroad. I’m not saying I would do that but can imagine someone doing that.
D13, as a transfer student from community college, didn’t have room to do a semster abroad and graduate on time.
Instead, she signed up for a 3 week summer class with a favorite professor and went to a National Park here in the States. She said it was an amazing experience.
Then, she signed up for a 3 week winter break class with another favorite professor and went abroad to South America. Again, another amazing educational trip.
For a student who cannot fit in an entire semester abroad, or for whom it’s just not their thing, there might be other off-campus programs that will give a lot of bang for the buck.
My D is a freshman and is in the research/application process for study abroad. She has found the study abroad office very helpful in giving her the information she needs for her interests and specific financial situation. She’s planning to do a study abroad language program with a homestay through her college for 6 weeks over the summer, and after that decide whether to do another semester later. There are a number of different types of programs. For many, you pay home school tuition, and the cost above and beyond what is already being paid is just airfare. For others, the school may have various types of aid available. D is very concerned about cost. Even the summer program, which is not covered by her scholarship and will be out of pocket for us, will allow her to graduate at least a semester early, and save us more in tuition and other costs than the cost of the program. They also apparently have aid available that is divided among students who apply to this program. The study abroad office at her school has been very careful to understand her finances, as well as map out her courses and various options so she clearly understands what she is getting into. We are encouraging her to do it, but without her visit to the study abroad office we would not have understood how many good options are available.
It is a personal decision. He should only go if it is something he truly wants to do and feels he will be comfortable in the environment. No right or wrong answer.
My D did a semester in Turks & Caicos (basically living on Gilligan’s Island, lol), and had an amazing experience. Fantastic field research opportunities, and great contacts in her field. I’d say she uses stuff she learned in that semester more than the rest of her college classes, combined. And she’s closer to the students from the program, too. S16 has a double major in Spanish, so we’re hoping he can go to Spain or LatAm in the fall of his junior year. And hope he does as good of a job selecting his program as D did hers!
Despite being a big fan of study abroad, I also have thought that compared to the intense and diverse semesters at a LAC, study abroad in one Ds case came up lacking. For those who would not otherwise engage much with a foreign culture or language, it is priceless. For a family that has overseas relatives, and the student might contemplate teaching English overseas or volunteering post graduation, it is a bit of a wash.
For mine, with financial aid at a LAC, the cost was similar, though I had to provide the spending money that otherwise might have come from work study. S was OOS at a state school, and the study abroad was actually cheaper than staying home.
I’m sure there are people for whom living/studying abroad is not a good idea, and situations where it is just not practical or possible, but, to me, when it’s possible, it’s an invaluable part of a broader education. You learn so much about yourself as well as the culture lived in when you take yourself out of your own fishbowl. (I had the experience several times, both in summer homestays as a teen, post college, and later as an AFS volunteer in the states helping students from other countries adjust to the US.)
Someone said that it may not be ideal for an introvert, or that it may be better for an introvert to live in a dorm room than with a family. I disagree! Maybe that would be true for an extreme introvert, but many of us ( I would consider myself in that camp) are actually very friendly in a different way, needing some alone time to process life and enjoying getting to know a few people well at any time as opposed to dozens or hundreds. I think living in a family can give the introvert a social group to be part of, whether or not he/she makes a lot of other friends. That can be very comforting. An introvert can get too isolated living alone in another country. The experience of living overseas and living with a host family can be beneficial for most types of people IMO, as long as they are reasonable stable, mature and flexible and the host family is well-vetted and motivated by some altruistic reasons. I agree with @zobroward, that a summer experience can be fine too…just as long as there is time to really immerse in the experience and not just be a tourist for a couple of weeks.
I don’t think it’s really "living abroad"if they are not sorting out their own housing, etc. The best comparison is probably being posted to a us military base somewhere.
Having known people who lived and worked on bases abroad, it’s not the same as the student experience. Bases have US stores, with US products, US cinemas with US movies, services, and more. You could go months without stepping outside the gates.
I don’t see why being given a local housing assignment diminishes the student experience. It’s not about finding an apt, it’s about integrating in other ways.
But many commercial study abroad programmes are nearly like that-live with other Americans and get taught by us faculty on a special curriculum. I think that the day to day administrative stuff is a big part of living in another country-it wasn’t until I signed my own lease and did my taxes that I really felt like I was living in the USA.
Ok, I do agree some commercial programs are a lot of hand holding. But this is about college study abroad and they usually either offer their own program (or one in partnership with another school) and have vetted for the academic experience (and safety and administrative functionality.) Telling an undergrad to show up and find his own housing is crazy.
We had to find our own, when DH had a PhD research grant. Even with support from the foreign U’s housing (and the grant program,) it was monstrous. DH spoke the language, I didn’t, at the time. Other students on the program had recently grad’d college and were doing their own independent research. Not undergrads.
"I don’t think it’s really “living abroad"if they are not sorting out their own housing, etc. The best comparison is probably being posted to a us military base somewhere.”
There are all kinds of study abroad programs. You can choose one where you are totally immersed - attending an international university with students from that country in the language of that country.
It would be different if someone was moving for an extended period of time but since most are moving for only a semester, arranging one’s own housing would be impractical for numerous reasons.
@chzbrgr, I can see how that would be true for an adult planning to spend a long time in a place…but I think the goal of most college students studying abroad for a short time is not to really feel as if they are living semi-permanently in that country (and not as a fully-launched, independent adults) but to get a window into the world of another culture. Living with a family can be the most direct route to doing this, especially if the experience only lasts a few weeks or months. Living in a dorm with other Americans or living alone in one’s own apartment could take many months (or years) to begin getting below the surface of a very different way of life, as lived by the people of that place.
The dorm experience can still be a good thing if that is the only viable or practical option…but the learning about the underlying culture, the array of personal attitudes and experiences of people there, the minutia of day-to-day life will not be as deep IMO. In fact, I would worry that if a group of Americans in the throes of culture shock (an inevitable stage) stick almost exclusively together for lack of opportunity to get to know host nationals well, then erroneous stereotypes of the host culture could grow.
Anyway, I don’t think OP is asking about signing a lease and living long-term, just wanting perspectives on whether the semester abroad experience is worth it, right?
I think it depends on the opportunity cost as perceived by the OP. Europe (or wherever the study abroad location is) will always be there, and perhaps be accessed at other times through summers, a gap year, working abroad after college, a scholarship opportunity etc. The undergraduate college experience is singular, and after 4 years, gone. Depending on how OP views his/her time at university, it may or may not be worth it spending some of that time away from the college.
Well I am happy to wade in here as I’ve lived overseas as a foreign service kid, as a student abroad living with a local family in both France and Germany and living and working in a Germany for a five year stint.
Foreign service (and also military) you are in a bubble mostly interacting with the other foreigners in the country. I attended international or American schools. So for example in Somalia I had friends who were Indian, but no friends who were Somali.
In France I lived with a French family and did everything with them. I got a very good picture of what one French family lived like. I had to eat what they eat, take baths on their schedules (the only bath was off the master bedroom). I picked grapes with them. I learned to cook some of Mme. Leveel’s specialities.
The summer in Germany I was just a border with a woman who fed me breakfast, but otherwise did not make me part of her (non-existent family).
Living in Germany (for five years and haivng a baby there) I learned more about the culture in many ways. It ended up really mattering that I couldn’t buy groceries (or much of anything else) on a Saturday afternoon. On the other hand I didn’t have to speak German at home or cook like the Germans, even if I was buying my food in German supermarkets. Oh and we didn’t have to find housing in Germany - the Max Planck Institute had an apartment building for visiting researchers. But we did have to buy a car, get driver’s licences, IDs, metro cards etc. Finding housing isn’t the important thing. Amusingly I did have to interact with the super the first week as our drains were all completely clogged by the excessive calcium in the water. He could understand me, but as he only spoke Bayerish, I could not understand more than one word in ten of what he said. By the end of five years, I was a lot better with the dialect, though still not perfect.
Study abroad programs vary wildly. My son had three - and only one got the housing situation right for a guy in the Middle East. (Family stays only work for females if you are with an observant Muslim family.)
I got something out of all of my experiences - including the foreign service. But really especially in the Third World foreign service officers live like colonials, not like the locals.
I wish I was back on my study abroad now (I’m a parent, who went over 25 years ago!). Amazing experience, you learn so much about other cultures and other ways of life (even how your host country’s university works differently than here. Its not the same when you go back as a adult.
Highly recommend it. But senior year is tough.