When Emma Freer was a high school senior in 2011, her impression of American campus culture — sororities, football games, broad course requirements — didn’t appeal. Her parents had saved enough money to cover her in-state tuition, but, she says, “I knew I didn’t want to go to Ohio State.”
College abroad offered a solution. Freer graduated from Scotland’s University of St. Andrews in 2016, debt-free and with a master’s degree in English and social anthropology.
“I got a really excellent academic education as well as a second education in travel, living abroad and being an outsider in a new culture,” Freer says. “I never wished I had gone to school in the U.S.”
Lured largely by promises of cheaper tuition, college-bound Americans are increasingly eyeing programs abroad.
Over the past five years, U.K. universities have seen the number of U.S. undergraduate applicants spike by 49%, according to the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, which manages the U.K. public university admissions system. The number of Americans studying in France has risen 5% over the past five years and jumped 50% from 2020 to 2021, according to Campus France, a French government agency that promotes higher education to foreign students. Meanwhile, Google searches in the U.S. for “college abroad” have more than doubled since February 2021.
But college affordability depends on more than just tuition. Understand the key costs of an international education before you book a one-way plane ticket.
Tuition
“The tuition is what draws people in, what catches their attention,” says Jennifer Viemont, founder of Beyond the States, a company that helps American students find degree programs in Europe.
Tuition abroad can vary depending on which city, country and type of school you choose. Germany, for example, abandoned public university tuition fees for all students — international included — in 2014. On the other hand, at England’s prestigious Oxford…
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