Ok, interesting piece in Foreign Policy* this week titled "Outsource Your Kid". The article is about the potential value of students attending college internationally rather than staying in the U.S. Of course, as one might expect, a great deal of this conversation revolves around the cost of education.
*I know I have based way too many of my blogs on articles from Foreign Policy
About 40% of college students in the U.S. pay less than $9,000 per year. Over 25% are in schools costing $36,000 or more per year. The average student loan debt in 2010 was $25,250 for a graduate--which means even the students attending the low end cost schools were getting aid to attend those schools.
Now, here is the kicker in the article. "Tuition costs for foreign students at some of the best universities in Asia, Europe, and Africa can be as low as $4,000..." Students, you will probably still not qualify to go to Cambridge or Oxford any more than Harvard, Yale, or MIT. And, rankings for schools still have 7 of the top 10 schools in the world located in the U.S. But, McGill University in Montreal is rated higher and costs about half as much as Duke University.
So, search around and pick the school you fit well with regardless of the location? Is that the real answer being given here to the question of where should I go to school? Well, read on and get my two cents about choosing a college.
1) Pick a school in a scenic location. Big cities are not scenic, they may be fun, they may have better restaurants, but they are not scenic. Rice fields are not scenic (caveat--beautiful on occasion during duck hunting season), I should know as I went to school in the middle of rice fields in Arkansas. Ok, maybe scenic is in the eyes of the beholder (the big open skies of Lubbock, TX are beautiful, and Appalachian State is ideally located in beautiful hills) so youcan go anywhere, but forget big cities--they really are ugly.
2) Pick the school with the best looking co-eds. Just joking here. Actually point number two is pick a school with interested students. If the students are not interested in being students--learning, engaging in intellectual activity, seeking answers to important questions in life (and whether or not the latest fashions and fads are cool is not an important question)--run away quickly and find a different student body in which to be a part.
3) Pick a school with solid faculty. Solid faculty may or may not mean faculty with Nobel Prizes and articles published in journals that only 30 people in the world will read. Solid faculty does mean people who are active in the scholarly and professional pursuits of their discipline. Solid faculty also means people who are interested in making their academic subject accessible to students. Some argument could be made that solid faculty also teach their own classes rather than relying on grad students to do the teaching. Personally I love time in the classroom, where else would I get paid to talk about stuff I like.
4) Pick any school but Auburn University. If I need to explain this, you obviously are not from Alabama or are of deficient character.
5) Relax, graduates from Eastern New Mexico University and graduates from MIT get jobs, get accepted to grad school, get accepted to law school.
*I know I have based way too many of my blogs on articles from Foreign Policy
About 40% of college students in the U.S. pay less than $9,000 per year. Over 25% are in schools costing $36,000 or more per year. The average student loan debt in 2010 was $25,250 for a graduate--which means even the students attending the low end cost schools were getting aid to attend those schools.
Now, here is the kicker in the article. "Tuition costs for foreign students at some of the best universities in Asia, Europe, and Africa can be as low as $4,000..." Students, you will probably still not qualify to go to Cambridge or Oxford any more than Harvard, Yale, or MIT. And, rankings for schools still have 7 of the top 10 schools in the world located in the U.S. But, McGill University in Montreal is rated higher and costs about half as much as Duke University.
So, search around and pick the school you fit well with regardless of the location? Is that the real answer being given here to the question of where should I go to school? Well, read on and get my two cents about choosing a college.
1) Pick a school in a scenic location. Big cities are not scenic, they may be fun, they may have better restaurants, but they are not scenic. Rice fields are not scenic (caveat--beautiful on occasion during duck hunting season), I should know as I went to school in the middle of rice fields in Arkansas. Ok, maybe scenic is in the eyes of the beholder (the big open skies of Lubbock, TX are beautiful, and Appalachian State is ideally located in beautiful hills) so youcan go anywhere, but forget big cities--they really are ugly.
2) Pick the school with the best looking co-eds. Just joking here. Actually point number two is pick a school with interested students. If the students are not interested in being students--learning, engaging in intellectual activity, seeking answers to important questions in life (and whether or not the latest fashions and fads are cool is not an important question)--run away quickly and find a different student body in which to be a part.
3) Pick a school with solid faculty. Solid faculty may or may not mean faculty with Nobel Prizes and articles published in journals that only 30 people in the world will read. Solid faculty does mean people who are active in the scholarly and professional pursuits of their discipline. Solid faculty also means people who are interested in making their academic subject accessible to students. Some argument could be made that solid faculty also teach their own classes rather than relying on grad students to do the teaching. Personally I love time in the classroom, where else would I get paid to talk about stuff I like.
4) Pick any school but Auburn University. If I need to explain this, you obviously are not from Alabama or are of deficient character.
5) Relax, graduates from Eastern New Mexico University and graduates from MIT get jobs, get accepted to grad school, get accepted to law school.
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