Same Price, Different Value?

An analysis of CMC’s study abroad pricing model.

Image Credit: "Public Office Is A 'Family Snap,'" Puck, June 5, 1889

Studying abroad is a core part of the academic experience at CMC, with around 40% of students choosing to spend a semester abroad. Unlike many other colleges, CMC centralizes study abroad financing through its Center for Global Education. The office pays each program’s invoice directly. These invoices typically include “a non-refundable program commitment deposit, the program tuition and fees, on-site housing and on-site meals, [and] additional international health insurance.” The Center also disburses stipends for food, local transportation, and airfare based on recommendations from the partner program abroad. 

Students, in turn, are charged a flat-rate fee equal to standard tuition plus room and board set at the maximum meal plan, to be paid through the standard payment portal. This creates a standardized pricing model across programs with vastly different costs. From this structure arises a natural question: if every student pays the same price, what is the relative value of each program?

The table below breaks down the cost per student across three high-enrollment European programs in Seville, Paris, and Copenhagen, measured against the 2025-2026 tuition and room and board total: $46,945.​

Food, Transportation, and Airfare stipend values obtained from interviews with CMC students.

These figures reveal both the cost difference between programs and the amount of CMC’s $46,945 baseline cost that goes unspent in each case. However, they do not capture the full picture. Copenhagen students, for instance, receive two fully-funded week-long international trips—including flights, housing, and meals—as part of their coursework. Meanwhile, Seville students receive weekend day-trip outings by bus to nearby towns in Andalucía without provided meals.

The gap between what students pay and the value they receive from CMC while abroad widens when accounting for what students must cover independently. Students studying abroad are responsible for paying visa fees—around $200 per program—and for navigating the visa application process: either surrendering one’s passport for up to four months through each program’s coordinated batch submission or incurring additional travel and logistics costs by applying independently. (CMC does reimburse the bulk of student visa costs for students on need-based financial aid.) Students must also pay for any meals beyond home-cooked meals that the stipend does not cover, such as restaurants, cafes, and food experiences that come with weekend travel. Although CGE suggests in its informational meetings that students can “stretch” their food budget to participate in these experiences without paying out of pocket, that is not the reality for many students abroad. As one student studying in Paris recalled:

I know some students in my program have a harder time affording it. They have to be more frugal, and they have to budget way more carefully, and they may have to keep from going out or going on a weekend trip. The money that they gave us really is just for basic living expenses—and not even that.

It is not as if these experiences are superfluous—they are core to a European semester abroad. Of the ten students I spoke with in formal interviews, nine said that international travel was core to their experience. Yet this crucial piece must be paid out of pocket, even though CMC charges full tuition over and above the cost of the programs themselves. CMC students are effectively paying twice—once with tuition, and again out of pocket—to fulfill the mission the CGE sets out: to “connect students to off-campus academic and cultural immersion experiences that support their personal, professional and intellectual development in a globalized world.”

An additional stipend that better equalizes the relative costs between CMC and each abroad program would directly improve any abroad student’s semester by allowing them to fully participate in experiential learning, which is central to the mission of the CGE, without relying on personal savings. 

Even allowing for the administrative overhead associated with running the Center for Global Education, retaining nearly half a student’s semester cost—in the case of Seville—raises two questions about proportionality. First: What justifies an overhead that equals half the cost of studying abroad? And second: Why would the overhead difference between Seville and Copenhagen be so large?

Kristen Mallory, Director of Global Education and Off-Campus Study at CMC, offered a compelling answer to the surplus question. The gap between what students pay and what programs cost, she explained, flows back into the college's general overhead and into a cohesive administrative safety net fund for students abroad. Take, for example, a student studying abroad in New Zealand who shattered his knee during orientation week and insisted that he wanted to remain abroad at his program. CMC stepped in to help him navigate surgery, worked with the partner program to arrange transportation to and from the hospital, flew in his mother for the procedure, and covered a full semester of private taxis to and from class. Likewise, if a student’s housing were to be damaged by water leaks, for example, Mallory explained that she’d be able to tell the student: “I can get you some cash to help you not be hungry; I can contact the partner program to say, ‘Get him out of that apartment and into a hotel right this minute—this is unacceptable.’”

CMC's institutional umbrella is part of its commitment to ameliorate the crises that students may experience abroad. That promise is real, and its value has been demonstrated. Nevertheless, that is not enough to explain the cost disparity between programs. A student in Paris pays the same $46,945 as a student in Copenhagen. The Paris student described above, who was given a food stipend which covered "basic living expenses—and not even that,” received the same 2 AM phone call guarantee, medevac coverage, and Dean of Students access as would any other CMC student abroad. Yet CMC kept roughly $19,000 from her tuition after program costs, compared to $12,000 for a student in Copenhagen. The protection costs the same for everyone, but the price students pay for it is not the same.

Mallory made it clear that this is by design. CMC charges every student the same base price (pre-financial aid and scholarships) on campus, and that philosophy extends abroad. Data science majors and literature majors pay the same tuition, even though their courses cost vastly different amounts to run. “Every [abroad] program is equally available,” Mallory says. This principle of equity, steeped in the liberal arts tradition, works on campus: every student is physically present, accessing daily the same dining halls, classrooms, computer labs, workshops, and advising infrastructure that their tuition funds support.

Abroad, though, that logic is strained. Students abroad cannot access many of the institutions which they are paying for. They cannot attend talks at the Athenaeum, hang out at the Care Center or work in Poppa Lab. What is mainly available is the institutional umbrella—namely, the emergency services—and that umbrella is identical across programs. On campus, the cross-subsidy between programs is immeasurable; students take non-major courses as part of their GE requirements or as elective credit, or hold multiple majors. Abroad, CMC receives an itemized invoice for each program. The surplus here is not an emergent property of an interconnected institution where value is opaque—the student in Seville contributes $11,000 more to the protective umbrella than the student in Copenhagen, full stop.

That said, the system can accommodate thrifty students. When asked whether CGE guides students toward programs with more embedded travel if they express financial concern, Mallory said that they do: advisors will steer students toward a program like Freiburg, which has 26 days of built-in travel across the European Union. But unfortunately, this does not satisfactorily address the issue. A student who wants to study in Seville—for the unique culture, language, and location—but cannot afford international weekend travel is not served by a referral to Freiburg. She must choose between her ideal location at a higher out-of-pocket price, or a less ideal location that’s more financially feasible. The referral to Freiburg is a workaround for a program that, given what the student paid, should have delivered more to begin with.

CMC does not need to abandon its centralized model, its safety net, or its commitment to equitable access to fix this. All it must do is fairly distribute a portion of the surplus funds back to the students who generated them. A fixed program overhead cost, set transparently, would allow CMC to return whatever remains above that threshold to students in lower-cost programs in the form of additional travel and living stipends—all while apportioning enough for the crisis infrastructure that Mallory rightly identifies as the model's greatest strength. As it stands, some students subsidize the system more than others, with no apparent justification.