Imagine that you had never been accepted to Brown — would it make sense to pay not to go there? Of course not, but this seemingly ridiculous policy officially governs Brown's relationship to study abroad.
All students who study abroad, no matter what program or country they choose, must pay full Brown tuition regardless of the fact that they are not attending Brown. The University then covers the costs of the program and pockets the difference. However, this hasn't always been the case. Brown students used to pay the cost of the program, which was generally much cheaper than Brown tuition.
How can the University justify such a blatant attempt to profit off of students? Apparently, charging the same rate regardless of the program is meant to encourage students to forego economic considerations when choosing a program or country and to base the decision solely on academic considerations. This is a fair point.
However, the University fails to live up to the values it espouses. It does not cover — or equalize the cost of — meals, travel, housing, study materials, insurance or any personal expenses, according to the Office of International Programs website. This is not a light consideration. A quick online search revealed that a flight to Barbados is under $200, while a flight to Melbourne, Australia is over $1000 more expensive. Brown makes no effort to equilibrate the cost of travel. Under Brown's current scheme, certain countries may be prohibitively expensive just to get to, even if the cost to study is the same.
As someone who is returning to Brown after studying abroad in Copenhagen, I can say with experience that the costs of living are very different depending on where you are. In Copenhagen, a cup of coffee at a cafe would range between $4-6, and that's for a simple, plain, cup of coffee. As one of the more expensive cities to live in, a typical meal out was at least $15 and could easily be over $20. While Copenhagen was certainly expensive, it was by no means typical of study abroad. In Prague, I could get dinner for less than $10, and a friend who studied abroad in Ghana told me that he could eat a solid meal for under $2. If the University's policy aims to take economic considerations out of the equation, cost of living differences are a glaring hole in that policy.
Of course, the pretense about having students pick programs based solely on academic considerations is mostly nonsense. I learned more in Copenhagen by riding buses and trains than by sitting in class. Exploring foreign cities, surviving unknown metros, ordering food and seeing that things aren't always done the same way are more important than anything you're taught in a classroom.
While academics remain fairly important, a study abroad experience is impacted far more by where you decide to live, with whom you associate and what kinds of experiences you have. Are the locals you meet all in the service industry? Are you only hanging out with Americans? Do you follow the local news or read the New York Times on the computer? Academics, which is the major focus at Brown, are at most study abroad programs merely a pretense to spend four months living abroad. For the University to claim that its policies encourage students to choose a study abroad program based solely on academic considerations completely misses the point of studying abroad. If students went about choosing the best academic experience, the only rational choice would be to stay here.
Ultimately, students appear to have been coming to exactly this conclusion since the inception of the new tuition policy began in 2009. That year, Brown's study abroad numbers dropped precipitously, with almost one hundred fewer students choosing to study abroad in the spring of 2009 compared to the spring of 2008.
While the numbers went up slightly in 2010, they were still way below the numbers that the University had been seeing before the change in policy. This drop occurred despite increases in Brown's total enrollment and the Euro's fall from $1.60 in the spring of 2008 to about $1.30 at the end of 2010, which should have made living abroad relatively cheaper.
The University must recognize that the only clear purpose of its policy of charging full tuition for study abroad is to enrich itself while robbing students of an experience of a lifetime. It forces students to base decisions on the expense of travel costs and increased cost of living. This is unfair to those students and to everyone who foregoes the opportunity to explore a foreign culture in favor of spending most of their waking lives in the Sciences Library.
Ethan Tobias '12 is a biology concentrator at Brown University who just returned from four and a half months in Europe with a considerably lighter wallet. He can be reached at Ethan_Tobias@brown.edu.
