STUDY ABROAD
She knew a Spanish breakfast, which is basically just coffee and toast, wouldn’t be
enough for us, so she just started getting us
cereal and juice and muffins every morning.”
The UNC in Sevilla program runs
$12,000 to $14,000 in total cost; the Honors
London program is about $14,000; the
Lorenzo di Medici program in Florence is
more than $16,000. “Every time I went to
the ATM, you get 50 Euros, and then my
bank statement would be, like, $90,” Sink
said.“It was terrible. [The weak dollar] really
did make a huge difference.”
Exchange programs are among the
cheapest study abroad options, especially for
in-state students — students pay the same
for tuition and fees that they would for a
semester at UNC, and then also pay for airfare, insurance and books. The exchange
program at the National University of Singapore is about $8,000 in total cost for in-state students, $17,000 for out-of-state.
In-state students who want to spend a
semester at the University of Sheffield in
England pay about $10,500 in total cost, but
an in-state student who wants to go to
Chung-Ang University in Korea, or Pontifi-cia Universidad Catolica in Peru, would pay
only about $7,000 — probably less than
what an in-state student spends during a
semester in Chapel Hill.
Programs in developing countries also
can be pricey, partly because of air fare (a
ticket to Rwanda can run $1,800 to $2,200,
while a flight to London is less than half
that) and partly because of the logistics of
establishing a program in, say, the outlying
regions of Bolivia. The School for International Training, one of the most respected
study abroad program providers, has a program in Botswana that runs about $20,000.
Carly Brantmeyer, for instance, knew she
wouldn’t be able to go to Africa unless she
could find an option cheaper than the popular School for International Training
options. Her program in Ghana was a partnership between N.C. State and UNC, and
is about half the price of the SIT programs.
“I searched on the study abroad Web site,
and the N.C. State program came up for
$10,000,” she said. “It was about $10,000
cheaper than the other Africa programs.”
Still, it’s sometimes less expensive in these
cases for universities to, as Miles puts it,
“outsource” some study abroad programs in
developing countries to third-party
providers who have longstanding programs
Britney Sink
Above, Britney Sink
took the most popular option — Seville —
and found the workload and attendance
requirements challenging.
Brandy Davila went
to Samoa and conducted research, for
which she wouldn’t
have been qualified
in the U.S., and
changed her major
as a result.
PHOTOS COURTESY
OF SINK AND DAVILA
Brandy Davila
