As a US citizen, I can find some good cheapish graduate schools in the US if I’m the resident of the state where the state school is located.
However, given how cheap many international schools are, is there a large US population trying to get in them? More importantly are there any good and cheap ones? (Particularly interested in social sciences.)
Cheap can mean under US$7,000 for a semester-type unit, or whatever you care to argue is cheap. Quality I guess is just whatever you can want to judge by that makes it an above average faculty and student body. (Maybe prestige is an almost fair proxy??) Flimsy definitions, but work with me here…I guess the bottom line is: are US students looking overseas for grad schools? Should they? I think the experience might be worth any slight confusion as to quality when coming back to the states (where school name carries a lot in some circles). Leave aside language restrictions and location for now. Thanks!
Although I suppose one might argue about whether it’s “overseas”, Canada might be a good bet. The University of Toronto and McGill both charge around $10k CDN per semester in tuition & fees for an international student pursuing a Master’s or Ph.D. At today’s exchange rate that works out to about $7500 US.
As for the prestige of either of these schools compared to those in the States, it’s hard to say. My impression is that they’re viewed as not quite equivalent to the “creme de la creme”, i.e. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, but they’re close to top-notch. This may be different in the social sciences, though (I’m in physics.)
The London School of Economics charges around $15,000 per year in fees. That seems to be in the price range given. Plus, masters degrees take only one year of study, as opposed to two in the US. A healthy percentage of grad student there are American.
As far as being a good financial deal, however, you’ve got to figure in the living expenses in Central London. That is, quite expensive.
As a classics undergrad who had a choice of finishing his degree back home in the US or in Europe, a number of classics professors in the US advised that I go to England, since supposedly if I were to get an American BS I would never succeed in returning to Europe for graduate education, as American classics education is perceived as very low-quality. I’ve since seen this to be true. While some bright American students do their masters degrees in Europe, they are few and even fewer are successful in securing a doctorate in Europe.
This is not true in all fields, obviously. And another problem is the language barrier for graduate schools in some non-English-speaking countries.
