When Hanan Nassau (SFS ‘05) went to study at the University of Hyderabad, India in the fall of 2003, he arrived to find a spacious jungle-side house fully staffed and serviced by a small army of servants including cooks, gardeners, cleaning people and even a computer repairman who was paid to stand by just in case one of the students’ three computers broke. The whole setup, including tuition, meals and travel expenses, cost Nassau no more than $8,000 for the entire semester.
The same trip, if undertaken exactly two years later, would set Nassau back over $15,000 just for tuition alone.
Thanks to a decision approved by the Georgetown Board of Directors in 2004, all university students planning to study abroad during the 2005-2006 school year will be required to pay full Georgetown tuition in order to have their credits from abroad count towards their undergraduate degree. The abrupt change in the University’s policy promises to make Georgetown’s immensely popular study abroad option more expensive even as it eases the financial pressure on this fiscally troubled institution.
“Given Georgetown’s financial reality,” University Director of Media Relations Laura Cavender said, “the University made the decision not to continue to subsidize the large number of undergraduates-52 percent-who study abroad at some point during their time at Georgetown.”
Currently, students pay a flat “credit transfer” fee of $3,000 in addition to the costs of living and tuition specific to their program. These were sometimes billed through Georgetown and, in other instances, handled directly by the student.
Georgetown Director of International Programs Michael Vande Berg said that the new policy would simplify the breakdown of costs for students and, according to rough Office of International Programs estimates, would only increase the average tuition cost for studying abroad by about $3,000.
Tuition levels at many popular European programs such as Oxford and Paris’s Institut d’Etudes Politiques are currently comparable to Georgetown’s.
Many students interviewed, however, said they were angry that they had to pay Georgetown prices for programs that are often academically inferior to the Hilltop. Some criticized OIP for not providing enough support to students abroad, and said that an increase in cost should come only with a large increase in OIP services.
Ian Ferns (CAS ‘06) who is a second-semester sophomore but has junior standing, charged that the new university policy was “unfair.”
“Even now study abroad is a rip-off,” Ferns said. “The university already drains us of money in so many ways.” Ferns said that when he learned of the University’s decision to charge full tuition in fall 2005 he quickly revised his plans to study abroad next year. Instead he hopes to save several thousand dollars by boarding a plane for the Costa Rica program next week.
Ferns was not alone among in his criticism of the University’s decision, but his decision to respond by changing his study abroad plans was almost entirely unique. Among those students interviewed who had already completed their study abroad, few said that they would change anything about their experience if they could go back and do it again under the new rules.
Kevin McAuliffe (CAS ‘05) called his spring 2004 program at the Universit? Lumi?re in Lyon, France “the top experience I’ve had at Georgetown,” and said a tuition rise would have changed little of his experience.
“To pay full tuition for the semester would not have been that big a difference for Lyon,” he said.
University officials evoke Georgetown’s difficult financial situation to justify their decision to raise overseas tuition rates.
“University overhead costs such as student financial aid, faculty and administrative salaries, on-campus services, maintenance and other costs don’t diminish whether students are on or off campus,” Cavender explained. “We simply could no longer afford to charge students only a $3,000 fee per semester-which amounts to a significant tuition discount-while they were abroad.”
Vande Berg emphasized that many of Georgetown’s “peer” institutions already charge full tuition to students studying abroad. He said that it was not surprising that Georgetown, which has the second highest proportion of students studying abroad among private American universities, felt it had to follow suit.
Vande Berg predicted that within ten years, every “well-known institution” will levy campus tuition on its students studying abroad.
Columbia, George Washington and Stanford are among the “peer” institutions which charge full tuition, but some such as Harvard and Yale have yet to begin such programs.
Cornell University has implemented three levels of tuition depending on students’ state of residency and school. Students going abroad are charged a flat fee of $4,090 in addition to costs of living and the host institution’s tuition.
According to Kristen Grace, Associate Director of Cornell Abroad, the University enacted the fee because it thought it was the fairest way to cover administrative costs of the program and provide sufficient financial aid. The fee is the highest of its kind among U.S. colleges, according to Grace, and leaves Cornell students paying vastly different sums for their study abroad.
A student enrolled for a semester at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, for example, will pay a grand total of about $11,000, according to estimates available on Cornell’s website. A student studying in Kyoto, Japan, by contrast, will spend over $23,000.
Grace said that the recent decline in the value of the dollar has made Cornell revise the projected costs of study abroad upwards. She took issue, however, with the claim that universities are losing money through study abroad.
“I think that administrators take that concern too far sometimes, since they are also the same people who play up study abroad’s benefits for new students,” she said.
Purposefully casting financial concerns aside, Vande Berg said that he backed Georgetown’s decision to treat study abroad like any semester completed on campus.
“If the credits are being used towards a Georgetown degree, Georgetown is justified in charging full tuition for them,” he said.
Such arguments failed to resonate with Alana Herro (CAS ‘05), who attended the same program as Nassau in Hyderabad in the spring of 2004. She said that even at such a low cost, the quality of teaching was not worth what she and her family ended up paying.
“It wasn’t Georgetown quality,” she said flatly.
Many students’ positions on the debate over charging full tuition for study abroad hinges on what the school intends to do with its new cash cow.
“It doesn’t seem fair in a lot of ways,” Herro said. “But I’d certainly be sympathetic if somebody were to come and break it down for me and explain why it was necessary.”
The money will be spread among three areas, Vande Berg said. A large portion will help fill holes in the general university budget, and some will increase the financial aid provided to help needy students pay for the full study abroad fare. An as yet undetermined sum will also go towards improving OIP’s services abroad, Vande Berg said.
The University intends to maintain its commitment to providing adequate financial aid to any student who needs it, said Vande Berg.
While OIP officials emphasized that the University has not earmarked any of the newly expected money for their office, many students said that they hoped it would transform the oft-criticized University institution.
The scene at OIP Resource Center in Poulton Hall, familiar to most students, underscores common complaints that OIP is overly bureaucratic and not easily accessible to students. A wall of boxes contains folders of unsorted feedback surveys and a confusing array of institution profiles, which are often outdated. Students line up at peak times before applications are due, and often leave frustrated, unable to get an immediate appointment with a study abroad counselor.
OIP consists of two branches: the Division of International Student and Scholar Services, which provides support for foreign students studying on the Hilltop, and the Division of Overseas Studies, which provides planning and support for Hoyas studying abroad.
The Division of Overseas Studies administers some overseas programs directly, but more often than not works with foreign universities and private companies to enroll and support students. These third party providers then bill the University for costs incurred by their Georgetown charges.
The employees of these third party providers are almost always the people whom Georgetown students appeal to overseas, sometimes with less than ideal results.
Tom Huddleston (SFS ‘05), who studied at the Science-Po in Paris last spring, where he matriculed directly into French classes, said that he found little of the minimal level of help he expected at the site.
“They pay this woman who’s supposed to help you find services, but she’s a flake; she does nothing for you,” he said. “You’re basically on your own.” Nonetheless, Huddleston said he greatly enjoyed his experience in Paris.
In evaluating her experience in the well-supported Hyderabad program, which is run by the Independent Council on International Educational Exchange, Herro said she disliked the lack of transparency involving the money she put into the program for trips and activities. She said she never learned where her money went and was mysteriously returned a portion at the end of the program.
Vande Berg said that part of the problem with providing support abroad stems from the fact that his office does not exercise direct control over most of the staff who work with students because the staff are not directly paid by the University. He emphasized, however, that Georgetown carefully reviews the results of survey questions answered by returning students and routinely dispatches pairs of administrators and faculty members to review overseas sites in person.
He said that OIP has yet to finalize a uniform system of measuring quality in study abroad sites.
The major complaints leveled at OIP tend to emphasize the extensive bureaucracy that results in oversights.
Katy Keen (SFS ‘04) said she spent her fall 2003 semester at the London School of Economics but then left over the holiday break.
“I went to LSE for the wrong reasons,” Keen said.
In retrospect, she said, she should have thought less about the name of the program than the qualitative experience outside of the classroom.
What made Keen most bitter about her experience at LSE, however, was the fact that the University refused to recognize the coursework that she had completed in the fall semester. Since LSE is a full year program, OIP, Keen said, told her that she could not receive credit because she had not completed final exams, which are administered in May. The result? Almost $50,000 spent with nothing but a mark of “Withdrew” on Keen’s transcript to show for it.
Mary Nagle (CAS ‘05) said she too was amazed and very nearly hindered by what she viewed as an absurd level of bureaucracy at OIP. Nagle took a semester off from Georgetown in the fall of 2003 because she wanted to register for a service-oriented program in Quito, Ecuador, that was not among the programs approved by OIP. Though she became seriously ill and could not finish the semester in Ecuador, the University told her “flat-out” that they would not give her credit for her coursework in the program because she had not gone through OIP application process.
Yet the semester after she had returned to Washington, Nagle said Georgetown allowed a pilot program at the very same service-oriented program she had appealed to the university to approve.
“I thought it was ridiculous that I was studying at this university and not getting any credit while the very next semester Georgetown students would be getting credit,” she said.
Vande Berg made it very clear that under the new policy as well as under the old one, coursework completed by students who take a leave of absence will not be credited towards a Georgetown degree. Students who transfer out of the University to study abroad, he said, face the risk of not being admitted if they wish to transfer back.
While Georgetown has not changed its position on the issue of academic credit, Associate Director for Overseas Studies Lori Citti said that her office has been working to make independent study abroad, such as the program Nagle attempted to pursue, easier for interested students to achieve.
Citti said she thought OIP was working well towards reducing bureaucracy and attending to students’ needs but regretted the fact that students often had to wait for appointments from the understaffed office.
The increasing burden on OIP employees comes as a result of a nationwide increase in interest in study abroad programs. According to Open Doors USA, the question on OIP staff members’ minds is whether this trend will continue now that Georgetown is charging full freight for the overseas experience.
According to Citti, the major concern for OIP in calculating the costs of going abroad lies with the variable costs of living, outside of tuition. These costs, Citti said, depend for the most part on the economic reality of a weakening dollar and the effect that political resentment against the U.S. may have on Americans’ desire to study abroad.
Tuition, insurance and certain other costs are protected from changing exchange rates because the University maintains reserves of foreign currency that it purchases at the lowest prices and with which it pays out expenses in foreign countries, Citti said.
But entertainment, most housing, travel and other leisurely activities all have prices that depend very much on the state of the dollar.
Brett Schwartz (CAS ‘05) said he enjoyed his year at Trinity College in Dublin last year but was hurt financially by the weak dollar.
“The exchange over there has been the biggest mess,” he said. “Everything was about 30 percent more.”
The hike in tuition, in addition to the unfavorable exchange rate and rising housing costs, will undoubtedly make study abroad in Western Europe more expensive next year. For many students such as McAuliffe, who studied in Lyon, the costs of going abroad are tremendous without the added burden of a raised tuition.
“I definitely spent more than I did any other semester,” McAuliffe said. But he added that he justified his increased spending by the several thousand dollars he was saving by not having to pay full Georgetown tuition. He worried that the tuition hike, coupled with the natural difficulty and reluctance that Georgetown students have getting a job while abroad, might make it difficult for some students to afford to go abroad.
Julia Schullman (CAS ‘03), a former Voice staffer who worked at Villa Le Balze in Italy in the 2003-2004 school year, thought that the University’s decision could have a harmful effect on a strong aspect of Georgetown.
“I think that it’s ridiculous,” she said. “I think that there will be some students who will not be able to afford to go abroad.”
Another concern among some students was that the rising across-the-board cost of going abroad might drive Georgetown students away from formerly cheap programs in developing countries to more well-established programs in Europe and elsewhere where they feel they are getting more for their money.
“I think that what we’ll see is that most students will shy away from less expensive programs in developing countries,” Huddleston said. “Because they won’t want to give Georgetown an extra cent.”
Against these concerns, Vande Berg said he believed interest in study abroad would not change dramatically with Georgetown’s new tuition policy. He pointed out examples of two precedent schools looked at by OIP that adopted full tuition policies but which he refused to name. These programs saw an increase in interest in study abroad after the rule was changed.
The average increase of what he defined as $3,000 would have little effect on Georgetown students who were interested in specific locations no matter what the cost, he said.
“If you and your family have committed to attending a university costing in excess of $40,000 per year, it is really hard for me to believe that a change of $3,000 in comparison to $160,000 will be adverse here in the long run,” Vande Berg said.
The satisfaction and convictions expressed by those students interviewed seemed to bear out Vande Berg’s predictions: almost all the students who went abroad say they would do the exact same program even at Georgetown-level prices.
Those sentiments are even shared by Nassau, whose bundle of Indian comforts would no longer be such a bargain at next year’s prices.
“Would I do it again if I had to pay full tuition?” he asked himself. “Yeah, I’d still do it.”
