Foreign Colleges

Going Off To College For Less (Passport Required) is a very interesting Novmeber 30, 2008 article from the New York Times. It reports that more and more Americans are going to elite colleges in other countries at a significant cheaper cost. Additionally, these same students cannot get into elite American Schools and therefore decide to study abroad. As the article states:

St. Andrews has 1,230 Americans among its 7,200 students this year,  compared with fewer than 200 a decade ago.

The large American enrollment is no accident. St. Andrews has 10 recruiters making the rounds of American high schools, visiting hundreds of private schools and a smattering of public ones.

With higher education fast becoming a global commodity, universities worldwide — many of them in Canada and England — are competing for the same pool of affluent, well-qualified students, and more American students are heading overseas not just for a semester abroad, but for their full degree program.   

I think this is a bad idea-very bad unless the student wants to live and work in that country permanently or at least for the time being. So much about college is about learning about the mores of our government, our society and our finance system and our social structures that too much will be lost by studying abroad. Yes, we are becoming a global economy, but we are not totally there yet and I am not sure that we will ever be.

Mitchell H. Rubinstein