JoanneB (US)

This is a nice to have, not a need to have. It is not essential. Your life may be enriched by you spending some time abroad, but your education will not be enriched by it. In fact sometimes it could actually suffer. Unless your daddy is rich, if you need to borrow up to your eyeballs to go college, you should forego this and seek to graduate early instead. Once you start working, you may well get the opportunity to travel. Besides, with so many foreign students now studying in the US, every college is practically a world classroom. We don't have to go to the world; the world is coming to us.