The season of inundating the Office of International Programs is upon us. Whether you’re slipping into the office between class hours to browse the program evaluations, haggling with the administration to let you go on an independent study or standing in line for an appointment, daydreaming to the pulse of Euro-tech, there’s one universal truth to study abroad at Georgetown: whatever your plans, they’re costing you (and your parents) a pretty penny.
Roughly half of Georgetown students from each class will go abroad during their four years, dispersed over 118 different programs. A select few will go to prestigious Oxford University, some to Humboldt University in Berlin and others will venture into developing countries like India and Ecuador. They will experience varying degrees of culture shock, encounter new cuisines and witness vastly different academic practices.
Perhaps the most shocking distinction is that the cost of education in most countries doesn’t amount to even a quarter of private university tuition in the United States. International students enrolled at the University of Auckland would pay only $7,129 in tuition fees, while $5,682 covers tuition and housing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Whatever part of the world they’re in, Hoyas are paying Georgetown’s full seventeen grand, at least if they want the credit.
“When we told people in Argentina how much we were paying, they were just shocked. It’s absurd,” remarked Robert Kris (SFS ’08), who spent last fall in Buenos Aires.
It hasn’t always been this way. Up until two years ago, students were paying the fees of their institution or university abroad, with the additional costs of housing and a $3,000 credit transfer fee. The university has since reasoned that students going abroad still have access to campus resources, and should pay full tuition regardless of the cost of their overseas program. Though the number of students going abroad hasn’t declined, OIP has not been able to equalize the difference in academic quality and services among programs due to a limited budget.
While corporations like GU partners CIEE (Counsel on International Educational Exchange) and IES (The Institute for the International Education of Students) cost more than direct enrollment—ranging from roughly ten to twenty thousand dollars per semester—they offer state-of-the-art facilities, private courses and multiple excursions. Students directly matriculating into universities didn’t have access to these facilities or activities at most sites, but also were paying significantly less.
Beginning in 2005, all Georgetown students were required to pay full Georgetown University tuition in order to receive credit. This year, all students going abroad will pay $17,784 in tuition and $140 for insurance per semester, not including housing, travel and personal expenses. For students studying a year in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, this means paying an estimated $44,818, and those at Sweet Briar College in Paris will be pushing $60,000 for their year abroad.
According to Jim O’Donnell, the Provost of Georgetown University, the decision was influenced by both the policies of peer universities and the fact that students weren’t paying their fair share while abroad.
“The decision to charge full tuition … puts us in line with the standard practice of many of our peer institutions in this area,” O’Donnell commented. “We were in fact subsidizing the study abroad of those who didn’t pay full tuition out of the tuition of those who did.”
The appeal of studying abroad is simple enough; students, some who have never left the contiguous states, will gain an invaluable experience living in another country. Still, many students are left asking themselves where all the money goes.
According to Katherine Bellows, the executive director of international studies, the majority of this money isn’t in the hands of the OIP.
“The money we give to institutions is something we do automatically,” Bellows said. “Structurally, the money comes in to us and we pay our folks over there, but all of this isn’t our money. We just have permission to pay our bills. None of it is solely controlled by us.”
O’Donnell, who is responsible for the main campus budget, commented that the allowance allotted to OIP is a priority, but this figure doesn’t correlate to the number of students abroad in any given year.
“We budget it as an academic priority, and we try to get the size and nature of the staffing calibrated to the anticipated workload,” O’Donnell responded. “It’s not done on a year to year basis, but we look at longer-term averages and growth or contraction.”
While fees of individual programs vary across the board, the total prices differ only based on housing and estimated travel expenses, not on the type of program a student enrolls in. OIP pays each program fee directly, and the rest of the tuition goes into the university overhead budget, much of which will never return to the study abroad department.
“Students overseas are using services of Georgetown campus—e-mail, advice from deans, pre-registration, reading The Hoya and The Voice online,” said Bellows of the reasons the university justifies students oversees paying for the overhead. “Paying for those things happens with the undergrads here.”
“[While abroad] you remain a Georgetown student, you have access to electronic library resources, advice from faculty mentors, to considerable support structures if you have a crisis abroad, and you remain eligible for and receive substantial financial aid through Georgetown and, most importantly, you earn credit towards a Georgetown degree,” O’Donnell commented. “We reviewed all these issues carefully … and we concluded that this was the best and fairest path for Georgetown to take.”
Kris had a different opinion on the matter.
“At Georgetown, you’re not just paying for classes, you’re paying for things like the library, Welcome Back Jack, the lawn, all this stuff you definitely don’t have in these programs,” he stated. “That’s why it is so absurd they charge you so much money.”
Kris went abroad for a full year, dividing his studies between CIEE’s Buenos Aires program and direct enrollment in the American University of Cairo. While he enjoyed both experiences, the differences between the two programs were remarkable.
“CIEE in Argentina did an amazing job,” he said. “They had a really great staff and there were two group trips that were included in the price. They really took care of us. The program in Egypt definitely didn’t have the same level of services.”
Such differences are common as students who witness first-hand the services of both direct matriculation and for-profit institutions like CIEE and IES can testify. Alison Sluiter (SFS ’08) spent her fall semester abroad at CIEE’s program in Warsaw and her spring directly enrolled in Berlin’s Humboldt University, with which Georgetown has a partnership.
“In Poland, I was given everything,” Sluiter said. “I didn’t have to pay for a single book the entire semester. And then to go to Germany, all of a sudden we were paying for everything left and right in a country that prides itself in its affordable if not free education system.”
Through CIEE’s Warsaw program, Sluiter was reimbursed for in-country train travel and Polish cultural events such as movies, museums and dinners.
“I was able to do a lot of travel in Poland that I would not necessarily have done had it not already been paid for,” she said.
Berlin was another story. On top of paying Georgetown tuition, Sluiter and the other students in the program were asked to contribute an additional 200 euro to cover Humboldt’s academic fees, a fact that did not sit well with anyone.
“I kept asking myself, ‘If I have to pay full tuition for a semester of Georgetown, why am I also paying academic fees for the German university system?’ Which I never really got an answer to,” Sluiter said.
Eric Edwards’ (George Washington University senior) experience was different. While he took the bulk of his courses at Humboldt University and Berlin’s Freie University, he enrolled through IES, which covered his tuition and language courses and provided access to a full-time staff, mentors and a high-tech computer lab. Though he felt the program “babied him,” as he had spent previous summers in Berlin, is fluent in German and at the more experienced end of IES’s spectrum of students, in the end, his credit was taken care of and he was satisfied with his experience.
“With IES, you can see the money being spent on something,” Edwards said.
Like Georgetown, George Washington charges its students full tuition for their abroad studies. But unlike students at GU, Edwards was given the option to study in Berlin through IES. Though the quality of the institution’s courses is not comparable to Berlin’s universities, students like Edwards can opt to matriculate in Berlin’s universities through the institute’s consortium, while taking advantage of quality facilities and a few excursions included in the bill. Still, Edwards admires Georgetown’s policy.
“I think it’s good that Georgetown has a really high standard,” he said.
$$$
The differences in quality and support across various programs poses a problem for students, as they are all charged the same flat-rate tuition regardless of the cost of the program they are enrolled in and the services and support they receive.
Former OIP director and recently retired Vice President of CIEE William Cressey stated that CIEE has tried to implement Georgetown’s philosophy of encouraging direct enrollment, as is done with CIEE’s program in Seville, Spain. While at Georgetown, Cressey defended the policy of students paying the fees of their individual programs, not full Georgetown tuition. Though he has tried wherever possible to offer enrollment in local universities to CIEE’s students, he supports Georgetown’s general policy of promoted direct matriculation.
“There are other advantages to going in a directly enrolled way, and that has always been a Georgetown philosophy, but obviously there are some significant financial differences,” Cressy said of the current policy.
Eryn Schultz (SFS ’08) also enrolled in CIEE’s Buenos Aires program. Though she contemplated opting out of CIEE and directly matriculating, which would force her to relinquish a semester’s worth of credit, in the long-run she was satisfied with her decision to remain in the program.
“I could have directly enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires and spent $250 on my academic fees,” Schultz said. “I wouldn’t have gotten credit and, honestly, with the Spanish I had going in, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. The program that I did through Georgetown definitely saved me a lot of heartache and time.”
While direct enrollment offers students a valuable, more independent experience, there are additional fees that tuition won’t always cover. Maureen Aiello (MSB ’08) spent last spring at the University of Sydney in Australia, where she was directly enrolled through the OIP. Though she didn’t personally have trouble financing her studies, she was unable to get a student discount that the university offers to exchange students, and personal expenses like joining a gym were costly.
“A lot of things Georgetown factors into your tuition aren’t something they assume at Sydney,” Aiello said. “There’s a minimal fee they tack on to your Georgetown bill, but at Sydney if you wanted to join the gym, it was eighty or ninety dollars, and then each time you wanted to visit the gym you had to pay an additional fee. Things like that add up. I played volleyball and I think it was $400.”
Aiello would have had enough credits to graduate if she had opted to take the semester off and enroll on her own, and would have then only paid around $8,000 in tuition.
“It would have been smarter if I had thought ahead to not enroll at Georgetown and just go directly there,” said Aiello.
Unlike Humboldt and Sydney, students studying in Madrid are provided with a Georgetown-exclusive staff and guided excursions at no extra cost. Stephanie Lukas (COL ’09), spent last spring directly matriculated into the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She was even refunded a portion of her housing during her home stay.
“The way that my finances worked out, it was like another semester at Georgetown, with the exception that Madrid is a little more expensive,” Lukas said.
$$$
For students who can’t afford to take a semester off and still graduate on time, there is no way to receive credits without going through OIP and paying Georgetown tuition. Sylvia Mitterndorfer, director of overseas studies and technology, said that although students have the option of finding their own study abroad site as long as it is approved by the OIP, called an Independent Consortium program, there is no possibility to retrieve credits for courses taken during a leave of absence.
“You’re taking a leave of absence because you’re not contributing to the overhead,” Mitterndorfer said. “That’s a fairness issue.”
The OIP is constantly looking for ways to improve its existing programs, but with 118 different sites, a modest staff and a limited budget, this proves difficult. In order to give attention to their programs, Bellows said the OIP can only afford to look at four to six sites a year.
“The money that the students are paying will go into sending a faculty member abroad to make sure educational quality is at Georgetown standards,” Bellows said.
Last spring, for instance, a portion of the budget was invested in sending a staff member to Africa. In general, safety and health are prioritized, and little attention can be afforded to the details.
“If you begin to look at every cost of every little thing in every program, whether it’s London or Dakar, Senegal … you begin to disintegrate the overall structure and quality … a one price fits all,” said Bellows.
The OIP may have big dreams to improve all of Georgetown’s study abroad programs, but at the end of the day, they still have to pay their bills.
“We say, ‘Here are our basic needs, here are our bills, here’s the pipe dream,’” Bellows said. “We never get the pipe dream because [the university] needs to finance other things.”
Although studying overseas has reached costly heights in recent years, the number of students going abroad remains high.
“We didn’t have a significant drop,” Mitterndorfer said of Georgetown’s policy change. “We expected that, but it didn’t happen.”
$$$
Nevertheless, international students attending Georgetown through an exchange program are reaping the benefits more than those abroad. In the case of exchange programs, like Humboldt and Oxford University, students from other countries don’t pay Georgetown tuition, and the university is stuck footing the bill.
“We actually lose out on that,” Bellows said of the exchange programs. “There are some areas where we have to ‘eat’ the costs of having an exchange.”
Georgetown has had little trouble attracting international students. Currently the university has about three hundred, most of who are not enrolled through exchange programs and are therefore paying full tuition.
“The number of students coming to GU from abroad remains at or near all-time highs, despite the sagging numbers of foreign students seen coming to the U.S.,” O’Donnell commented. “The number of our students going abroad … also remains very high. Making that happen while maintaining the highest quality education and research on the Main Campus is what we try to accomplish and I think we do a good job.”
We’ve all heard, witnessed or experienced OIP horror stories, but on the whole, Georgetown’s OIP does encourage more students to go abroad than most universities, and students remain grateful for that.
“If I only had to pay the cost of [CIEE], but [Georgetown] made it nearly impossible for me to go, that would be worse,” Schultz said.
Still, the financial situation remains unsettling, and while a reversal of the policy isn’t in Georgetown’s near future, equaling the level of support and services at each program would be a welcome improvement.
“They need to have equally rich immersion programs and the support has to be similar, or at least comparable,” Aiello said.
As the OIP and students struggle to pay the bills, at least there’s room for a sense of humor.
“I missed it because I was working, but last week, there was an OIP welcome back pizza party,” Kris remarked in jest. “I planned on going and taking boxes of pizza to try to repay the ten thousand dollars they made off of me, but it would have to be many trucks full of Domino’s.”
