BY YOEL ROTH

In print | Published September 17, 2009

With just over two weeks remaining before I leave for England, I’m going to put on hold the snarky retelling of my study abroad foibles and tackle a slightly more serious topic: money.
After spending a good amount of time the last few weeks trying to break down the financial side of studying abroad, I have to say — it doesn’t make much sense. And so, I’m going to spend this week’s column trying to explain, financially, how I see the study abroad program at Swarthmore. I’ll also outline the ways in which the numbers don’t add up. And there are quite a few.

As a starting point, let’s talk about tuition. According to the bill Swarthmore so happily sent my parents this summer, my total cost of enrollment at Swarthmore for the fall semester is $24,625. This breaks down into $18,755 as my actual “tuition” and $5,870 in room and board. Using a fancy trick known as multiplying by the number two, the total amount due to Swarthmore for my education this year will be $49,250 – $37,510 of it in tuition costs. Painful, but ultimately, nothing new.

Going by the rather convoluted series of tables on Oxford’s website, the cost for a student from outside the UK or European Union to attend Oxford is £17,223 per academic year, or about $29,645. Leaving out any complicated considerations of room, board, living expenses and exchange rates, there’s already something seriously wrong: somewhere between Swarthmore’s tuition and Oxford’s, $7,865 of my parents’ money seems to have vanished.

I’ll readily admit that this isn’t all Swarthmore’s fault. When it comes to tuition, Swarthmore is only paying the amount demanded by Sarah Lawrence College, the school actually managing my study abroad program. Between Oxford and Sarah Lawrence, the cost of an education jumps from $29,645 to a staggering $41,040 in tuition alone. (And Sarah Lawrence students get screwed even more than I do; the amount Swarthmore has to pay was, without much explanation, adjusted down by $1,765 per semester). But still, this only shifts the discrepancy from one school to another — it doesn’t actually explain it.

Where things get even more complicated is on the subject of room and board. Oxford
estimates that an undergraduate student will spend about £6,800 (or $11,702) on food, accommodations, and “general living costs” over the course of a year. Swarthmore, if you recall, billed me $11,740 for room and board for the year. Of that, they paid $4,000 to Sarah Lawrence for my off-campus housing, $1,500 to me for travel expenses, and $1,300 per semester for food and assorted living expenses, for a total of $8,100. This leaves $3,640 that I’m paying to Swarthmore in room and board that, seemingly, is going nowhere.

Moreover, Sarah Lawrence’s own estimates for how much I’ll spend on food and living expenses in no way line up with Swarthmore’s $2,600 food stipend. By Sarah Lawrence’s account (published in their handbook for students), the average student will spend about £100 on “food, personal expenses, and entertainment” in a week, although the handbook then continues to say that the cost of food alone can range from £40 (for a vegetarian student) to £150 per week. Using a conservative estimate of 29 weeks in an academic year and £40 on food per week, this comes out to, at the very least,£1,160 for one year, or just shy of $2,000.

This is assuming that I’m a vegetarian and intend to subsist at Oxford on lentils and carrot sticks, which, of course, I’m not and I won’t. Even applying Sarah Lawrence’s own fairly conservative £100 per week amount, this comes out to $4,990 for the year, or $2,390 more than Swarthmore thinks I need to survive. Either the study abroad office thinks that I’m going to learn how to photosynthesize and acquire my nutrients from sunlight and water while abroad, or there’s something seriously flawed in how living expenses abroad are calculated.

One possible explanation for the discrepancy is that Swarthmore expects me to contribute some of my own money towards my upkeep in England. While I accept that luxuries like travel and shopping are my responsibility, I reject the idea that I should have to pay for board beyond what I would at Swarthmore. After all, the financial aid office happily informed me that I wouldn’t be receiving any aid from Swarthmore because, as they put it, between my parents’ contribution and the money I earn working as a Genius at Apple, we can handle it. If the financial aid office expects me to contribute to the cost of my education from my own earnings, the fact that the foreign study office more or less counts on me contributing, too (to the tune of $2,390), seems a lot like double-dipping. And this is after a number of other unavoidable study abroad expenses that Swarthmore declined to cover, such as my $280 student visa. For shame.

So, all things considered, we have two very basic problems here: Sarah Lawrence is ripping me off, and Swarthmore is ripping me off. Over $11,000 disappeared somewhere between my parents’ checkbook and Oxford. That, combined with the entirely inadequate stipend Swarthmore mailed me, adds up to a bitter taste in my mouth about the whole experience prior to even leaving the country. On behalf of every student currently abroad, and every student considering going abroad: I think we’re owed an explanation.

I can only assume that things get better from here.

Yoel is a junior. You can reach him at yroth1@swarthmore.edu.

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