Best Value countries for students to study abroad

For the majority of students, the most important factor when deciding where to study is often the cost of tuition fees. An Oxbridge education in the UK undoubtedly is the most prestige, but with a price tag of $28,000 per year is it worth considering a country where tuition fees are up to 55 times lower? Focusing on fees alone can be a rather prohibitive way of looking at things; as while certain countries, such as Switzerland, boast amongst the cheapest tuition in the world, high-living costs mean that monthly outgoings can soon stack up. At Moneytransfers.com we’ve looked at a number of different factors to ascertain the cheapest and most expensive countries in the world for students.

Germany and Turkey Share the Cheapest Tuition Fees

Germany boasts no fees for undergraduate degrees and a one-time enrollment fee for postgraduate degrees, which takes the country’s average tuition costs down to an impressive $42 a month. As if this were not enough, when we factor in the quality of the universities, many of which are top ranked, we can truly see what great value a German degree is. While Turkey has the same average tuition fees, its highest ranking university is placed at 477th in the world, so perhaps does not represent quite the same value for money.

The United Kingdom Has the Most Expensive Tuition Fees in the World

The QS World University rankings feature 89 British institutions, and four of the top ten spots are given over to English Universities, so while the fees top our charts at an eye-watering $27,800, many would think it a price worth paying. Prestigious American colleges occupy all but one of the remaining top spots, with MIT ranking at number one, so the United States can also justify its place amongst the highest chargers. Australia and Canada, however, might struggle to say the same, with their most prestigious universities ranked 30th and 31st respectively.

Swiss Groceries are most Expensive, While Egypt Has the Cheapest

Snow-capped Switzerland boasts tuition fees that are among the lowest in the world, but the flipside is that the country is a very expensive place for a food shop. A basket of goods has an average price of $121.84, with the sky-high prices attributable to import restrictions and tariffs on agriculture.

The cheapest groceries can be found in Egypt, where a basket of shopping costs an average of $33.35. Metro Market is Egypt’s largest supermarket chain and students will love the prepared food department, which serves up hot items like brown rice, chicken and almonds for a quick and inexpensive meal.

Switzerland Has the Most Expensive Medical Insurance and Italy the Cheapest

It isn’t just groceries that are expensive in Switzerland; at $350 a month the country also has the highest priced medical insurance. While Switzerland has a universal health care system, it does not have free public healthcare and all residents, including international students, must take out their own policies. The great news is that EU and UK residents can apply for a EHIC card to receive state-funded healthcare at a reduced cost during their stay.

At $165 a year, Italy boasts the cheapest health insurance, and again students from EU/EEA countries can request a free European Health Insurance card, which covers them throughout the Eurozone. For everyone else, the insurance policy is mandatory and students won’t be able to obtain a visa without first securing one.

Medicine is Inexpensive in Egypt, But Comes at a Cost in Switzerland

No one wants to think about falling ill, but should you find yourself needing medicine in Egypt you’ll be relieved to hear that pharmacy prices are inexpensive averaging at just $2.21. If you are currently on a prescription though, it is advised that you bring your own medication with you. Due to political unrest, coupled with pharmaceutical price hikes and inflation, drugs in the country are often erratically available.

By contrast, Switzerland is the most expensive country for medicine, with an average pharmacy prices costing $45.82. The high prices are said to be the result of a market which suffers from excessive margins, high factory prices and a low proportion of generic medicines.

Ireland’s Transport Prices Are 11 Times Higher Than Egypt’s

With a monthly travel pass costing almost $120, the Emerald Isle is one place where it pays to drive. Luckily there are discounts, such as the Student Leap Card or the Bus Éireann service that students can take advantage of, but 38% of Irish students instead opt to travel by bicycle, which is certainly the greener and healthier option.

At just over $10 a month, Egypt is the cheapest country for transport costs. In Cairo, there is an inexpensive public metro, while buses and taxis are generally economical too.

Egypt Has the Cheapest Rent

Egypt is also the cheapest country for rent, with the average price of a one-bedroom apartment coming in at $108.88, and even if you settle in the bustling capital of Cairo it won’t set you back more than $150 a month. Students studying at Beni Suef University can benefit from lower accommodation prices still, with an apartment in the agricultural city coming in at less than $80 a month. The country with the widest range of rents is Turkey: students studying at Kocaeli University in Izmit, popular for engineering and architecture, can expect to pay less than $85 a month for accommodation, whereas those opting for Istanbul’s bustling city life will have to budget many multiples more, at an average $453 a month.

Singapore Has the Highest Rent

With fierce competition for real estate, it should come as no surprise that Singapore is the most expensive country for rent. One way that students can cut costs is to commute in from Bukit Merah, which is just a 15 minute drive away from the popular National University of Singapore. Among the top five most expensive countries for renting, the greatest swing in rates is to be found in the United States. While students studying at West Virginia, Marshall or Fairmont State will be able to find accommodation for less than $1,000 a month, those at Columbia, NYU and Cornell can expect to pay two and a half times the amount.

Working Out Comes at a Cost in Singapore

Singapore is the most expensive country for gym membership, with a monthly pass costing an average of $117. An alternative option for students in the Lion City is to opt for a pay-per-use gym like Gymboxx which charges $8 for a three-hour slot, while Gym Brigade, a gym that specialises in powerlifting, offers $3 pay-per-entry slots for students. Egypt comes out top again in this category, with the best value-for-money gym membership averaging less than $17 a month.

Remittances to the United States Are the Cheapest, While Brazil Battles Pricey Transfer Fees

Some students may be depending on remittances from back home during their studies and sadly the cost of transfer fees can quickly add up, especially for those making numerous transactions throughout the year.

Setting up an international bank account can be an excellent option for students, and these are ideal if you need to provide an account number for bills and direct debits. However, when sending money to students overseas a specialist money transfer organisation will often be the best option, as banks can levy expensive transfer fees to receive money from overseas

Jonathan Merry

While much it depends on where money is sent from. However, the United States is on the whole the cheapest place to send money to, with average transfer fees of just $1.85. On the other end of the scale, Brazil is the most expensive country in which to receive money, with transfer fees often averaging $10.00.

Egypt Has the Highest Graduate Unemployment Rate

Despite coming top in many categories for its low cost of living, Egypt has the highest unemployment rate for graduates at 15.28%. The numbers are particularly jarring for women, with an unemployment rate of 41.2% for female university graduates. The top degrees for finding employment in Egypt are:

1. Petroleum Engineering

2. Operations Research and Industrial Management

3. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Germany Has the Lowest Graduate Unemployment Rate

Germany has the lowest graduate unemployment rate at 2.42%, with the robust education system providing the skills that graduates need to find work instantly. The easiest degrees for finding employment in Germany are:

1. Medicine and Dentistry

2. Law

3. Industrial Management

Singapore is the Most Expensive Country For Students

With average monthly costs of $5,203.22 Singapore is the most expensive country for students. There is fierce competition for real estate on the island, and as a result the bulk of your outgoings will be on rent. Singapore also has some of the highest tuition fees in the world, but with three top universities on this 280-mile wide island rivalry for places is high and prices follow suit. Certain degrees, such as medicine and law, can lead to even greater costs, and with only two universities on the island offering courses international students can expect to pay around $100,000 in tuition fees alone for such degrees.

The second and third most expensive countries for students are the United States and Canada respectively, and as with Singapore the bulk of the costs are attributable to high tuition fees. The United States may justify its prices by the fact that over half of the top ten ranked universities in the QS Best University Guide are American institutions. While rent in the United States is high at over $1,500 a month, students looking to receive remittances from back home during their studies can benefit from the lowest transfer fees across the board.

Germany is the Best Value Country For Students

Marvellous Munich was recently ranked as the second best city in the world for students and it isn’t hard to see why. The Bavarian powerhouse is home to multiple headquarters for large-scale companies, such as Accucentre, BMW, Deloitte and PWC. It’s this employability ranking, which remains true for the rest of Germany, and the fact the country has the lowest graduate unemployment rate that makes it an excellent prospect for students who want to stay on after their studies. Germany can be expensive at times, with high costs for both healthcare and grocery shopping, but with the lowest tuition fees in the world, the costs are more than manageable.

Our second best value country is Mexico, which has long been a popular destination for American students owing largely to the proximity to their homeland and large amount of options for transferring money between the two routes. The average cost of tuition fees is just $750 a year, making it second only to Turkey and Germany, and like the former the cost of living here is low. Students hoping to rely on money from family members back home will also benefit from low transfer fees on their remittances. Finally our third best value destination for students is Thailand, which pairs reasonable rent and tuition fees, with one of the lowest graduate employment levels in the world.

UK in the bottom five countries

The bottom five countries are a mixed bunch, with very different factors driving the high cost of living in each.Singapore, for example, is suffering from a real-estate crisis, so while its tuition costs are not themselves prohibitive, the eye-watering local rents send it plummeting down our affordability charts. The cost of living in this island city is high, with many groceries needing to be imported in and organisations, including gyms and fitness centres, passing on high rents and overheads to their customer base. A similar trend is seen in Switzerland, which boasts tuition fees of just $117 a month – among the very lowest in our rankings – but the Alpine country is then let down by its phenomenally high day-to-day expenses, with the world’s most costly groceries, health insurance and medicine. In the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada a different picture emerges. Sky-high tuition fees account for by far the majority of a student’s average monthly outgoings in these countries, but with both the United Kingdom and the United States currently in the midst of a cost of living crisis, rising food prices and increased transportation costs as a result of fuel shortages mean that students are feeling the pinch more than usual. Canada may have a comparatively low cost of living but students hoping to work in the country after their studies will have to contend with the fact that Canada is tied with Portugal and the Netherlands for the worst price to income ratio amongst developed nations. High student loans are also a factor that threatens to put graduates off studying in these nations. For many, however, these high costs are thought to be a price worth paying to access the best education in the world, particularly in the UK and US where a career is all but guaranteed, with graduate employment rates in excess of 95%.

Best to Worst Value Countries - raw data

Conclusion

Students have a host of factors to take into account when choosing where to study, including their intended degree or career prospects after graduation. But one thing our study highlights is the sheer scale of the differences between countries, and the fact that the age-old saying of ‘you get what you pay for’ simply does not apply - which our best-value country, Germany ably demonstrates with its leading universities and zero-cost undergraduate tuition. Costs are undoubtedly an important consideration for many young people, and with monthly outgoings nearly 13 times higher in Singapore than in Egypt, it pays to be informed and shop around.

Methodology

We took the top 20 countries from this list here, and assessed them across the below ranking factors.

In order to accurately rank each location across all nine ranking factors, we first standardized the data for each factor. Standardization involved transforming the raw data into a common scale, typically ranging from 0 to 100, where 100 represents the most favorable value. The formula was calculated to give cities with higher costs (for example, higher tuition fees), a lower score for that specific ranking factor. Next, we gave each ranking factor a specific weight to improve the accuracy of the ranking. A higher weight (0.3) was given to the tuition cost and unemployment ranking factors, and the remaining ranking factors were given an equal weight (0.1). The standardized scores for each ranking factor were multiplied by their corresponding weights, and the weighted scores were then summed to calculate an overall score for each country. This overall score represented the affordability index for studying abroad in each respective country. Locations were then ranked based on their overall scores, with the lowest score indicating the cheapest country to study abroad based on all the data gathered.

Tuition Fee Data:

For this ranking factor, the search was focused on finding average yearly tuition fees per country for international students.

The data corresponds to undergraduate studies (generally a bachelor degree of around 4 years in duration)

Info from official government websites was prioritized, but websites specialized on international studies and cost of living were also used.

In cases where the data available was for monthly fees or semester fees, the data was transformed into yearly fees.

Every price was transformed from local currency to USD at the moment of collection.

Food Prices Data:

For this ranking factor, the data per country on a selection of food prices found on the source website (https://www.globalproductprices.com), proved to be the best choice as included data for every country on the list.

The data on this website is up to date (prices were for April / May of 2023) and it’s collected reliably from online supermarkets, more info on how it’s collected here (https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/downloads/GPrPr_sources_and_methods.pdf)

HealthCare/ Insurance Data:

On this factor, the search was for the average price of insurance for an international student per country.

As with tuition fees data, official websites were the main source and cost of living websites were also used.

Distinctions were made between public and private insurance, if insurance was obligatory or not for students, etc.

In cases where there was more than one yearly price on the source website, the median price was selected. (For example, Canada https://uhip.ca/get-started/#cost-of-uhip)

Pharmacy Costs:

For this factor, the prices for a selection of medicines were manually searched and obtained from pharmacy websites.

The selected prices were for generic brands in most cases, or famous low cost brands, always selecting the median price when comparing. The selected websites were for the biggest pharmacy chain available.

Data for Greece it’s missing as I couldn’t find any website with prices for the selected medicines.

Public Transportation Data:

For this factor, the prices collected were for an average one way ticket and monthly pass for transportation per country.

The main source was numbeo.com, given that it includes every country on the list and it’s constantly updated by people living in each country.

Accommodation data:

The collected data was average rent prices for a 1 bedroom apartment per country. Distinctions on prices in city center vs outside of city center, and prices for the biggest city per country were made.

The main source again was the numbeo.com database.

Gym Membership Data:

The collected data was average monthly price of membership of a fitness club (gym / sports)

The source was the numbeo.com database that includes every country on the list.

Employment prospects data:

For this factor, the collected data was youth unemployment and unemployment with advanced education, per country.

The source was the World Bank stats website, as it’s a reliable source that includes every country on the list

Cheapest country to receive money:

The data here it’s the cost of fees to receive money per country (standard fees and exchange rate)

Fees were calculated using results from moneytransfers.com, sending 500 USD (through Bank Transfer / Debit Card) from USA to the rest of the countries. For USA, fees are calculated sending 400 GBP from UK.

Remittance fees were calculated using results from Moneytransfers.com when sending $500 through Bank Transfer/Debit Card from the United States to the rest of the listed countries.

For the United States, fees were calculated when sending £400 from the United Kingdom to the USA.