More US students opt for foreign universities

ST ANDREWS (Scotland): With higher education fast becoming a global commodity, universities worldwide 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 programme.

Mr Ryan Ross of Annapolis, Maryland, applied to only the University of St Andrews in Scotland, McGill University in Canada, and Trinity College in Ireland. 'I knew I wanted a different experience,' said the freshman, who is studying international relations at St Andrews.

And he is not alone. Of the 7,200 students at the university this year, 1,230 are Americans, compared with fewer than 200 a decade ago.

The international flow has benefits - and trade-offs - for both sides.

For American students, a university like St Andrews offers international experience and prestige at a cost well below the tuition fees at a top private university in the United States. But it provides a narrower, more specialised course of studies, less individual attention from professors - and not much of an alumni network to smooth entry into the workplace when graduates return to the US.

For overseas universities, international students help diversify campuses in locations as remote as coastal Fife, home of St Andrews.

Just as important, foreigners are cash cows. While students from Scotland and England and across the European Union pay little or no tuition fees at St Andrews, Americans pay about what they would as out-of-state students at leading US public universities.

Although admission to St Andrews is intensely competitive for European students, with at least 10 applications for each seat, many Americans who would be long-shot applicants at Ivy League schools can find a place there.

'I applied to, and got into, some American liberal arts colleges like Skidmore and Trinity,' said Ms Savanna Cummin, a St Andrews student who was not admitted to Brown or Harvard. 'But I thought my time and my money would be better spent here, that I'd get more out of the experience.'

Mr Stephen Magee, the vice-principal at St Andrews, emphasises that Americans are not displacing home-grown students. 'If a Scottish parent asked why their very talented child did not get into St Andrews, when so many Americans did, I would tell them to ask the government, which encourages us to take international students, but caps the number of local students it will pay for,' he said.

Scottish universities have a different approach from American institutions to education. Students apply to the department they wish to study in, and specialise from the beginning, with no requirement that they take courses in many different fields, as is generally the case in the US.

For some Americans, the Scottish system represents a kind of happy medium, with early specialisation, but some room to explore areas outside their major, and even change majors, during the first two years. English universities, with their three-year, entirely specialised programmes, are a harder fit for Americans.

NEW YORK TIMES