MFL year abroad in France

[AfterLeavingMrMacKenzie]

All being well, DD will be going to study in France this September for the 3rd year of her degree.

The university has put on a couple of information sessions for the students and given them a list of institutions with which they have exchange programmes.

They've said that with regards to funding (Turing) they don't know how much will be available but it won't be much and they don't know when they'll be allocating it.

I'd love to chat with other parents whose DC are doing a year in France or did one in the past.

DD doesn't have an EU passport.

MFL students aren’t the only ones who do compulsory years abroad. The Turing scheme is a total mess and we in universities tear our hair out about it. Eligibility alters between institutions and then between individual applicants. We never know how much we’ll get as an institution or within each department.

Another effect of Tory mismanagement and those who voted for them and for Brexit.

The Embassy is not an international relocation service. Students are not moving their place of residence - a student visa is for a temporary, time limited duration and the student's place of residence remains their parents' home in the UK, hence the easiest form of health insurance being an extension to their family's private health insurance policy.

I agree that the Turing scheme is a total mess. However, when it was created it was communicated very clearly that it was going to cover a wider range of courses and geographies than Erasmus had. As I pointed out up thread, in the UK MFL students were abnormally (by EU wide standards) advantaged by Erasmus, in large part because UK undergraduates in other disciplines don't have the language skills to allow them to study eg engineering or natural sciences or economics in another language.

It is extremely unfortunate that MFL 3rd years abroad (which were financed by local authority grants pre-Erasmus and pre-student loans) are now neither financed nor organised by universities in place of Erasmus grants and exchanges. Students find themselves on the open market with no public money to subsidise their years abroad.

The UK, post-Brexit, charges extraordinarily high fees to incoming EU students and it is therefore to be expected that UK students spending a year abroad have those unfavourable conditions reciprocated. The whole situation is tragic.

Indeed @Ceramiq I was simply pointing out that many degrees include a year abroad option - I once taught at a university where the American Studies degree required a year in the US studying and the costs were covered by reciprocal teaching at each university - no Erasmus funding.

The Turing scheme was a sop to us in universities who pointed out that no funding vastly advantaged students from middle class families.

I think it’s absolutely right that it’s awarded via means testing and to any eligible student wanting to do a year abroad as part of a degree (my current place offers degrees in almost all disciplines with the option of a year abroad).

But the administration of Turing was handed over to Capita - who made such a good job of their running of other government schemes (sarcasm font off).

Don't blame university staff - we rarely know what the Turing pot will be at the start of the academic year.

@Ceramiq I did not say there was no uni accommodation abroad, I said the uk uni did not organise it for students. My DD got accommodation at Geneva Uni for she, personally, applied for it. Not her home uni.

It was very much the case that Erasmus funded MFL students for the year abroad. Obviously others benefitted too. Now Turing is given on financial need, not academic need. That’s the change. It will make MFL elite.

Montpellier is lovely so long as you avoid certain areas (like with most cities, the link given tells you which neighbourhoods are problematic). However finding accommodation is really difficult. Someone upthread mentioned the CROUS which offers student rooms close to the unis at very cheap rates, but they're in very high demand.

I'd definitely recommend trying to get a job as an English assistant (even if you don't like kids it's only 12 hours a week for about 800€, and you can ask work just 2 days a week so as to fit uni in too).
Lille is also lovely and obviously much closer to England.
Public transport is pretty good in all the big cities, with great offers for students.

Which other cities is she interested in?

As if everyone has private medical insurance.

So, back in the real world...

Appreciate the range of experiences being shared here. @Ceramiq just to note because you've mentioned it a couple of times, not everyone has private health insurance.
DD is currently favouring study in Switzerland as I think Tizer mentioned, when she comes to apply. She's quite happy to be a language assistant or teacher but fears not socialising with people her own age; good to know this could be a complementary option as she will probably need to work. We tend to fall in that awkward place of earning too much for grant eligibility and not enough to self-fund; and frustratingly, the Welsh Government plans look to support students at Welsh unis, but not Welsh students studying elsewhere in the UK.

@LittleBigHead "Don't blame university staff - we rarely know what the Turing pot will be at the start of the academic year."

While the situation is clearly not of the university staff's making, the communication of the new, far less favourable, funding circumstances is within their remit. While it might make it a lot harder to recruit students for MFL courses if language departments were explicit in their pre-application communications about the financial and bureaucratic hurdles involved in the 3rd year abroad, I would argue that it could constitute mis-selling and/or misrepresentation not to do so.

@TizerorFizz My point was that accommodation was often easy to procure with Erasmus as students were not expected, in many destinations, to rent on the open market and incoming Erasmus students often received a great deal of support from the host university. Students weren't on their own because their UK university wasn't helping them with accommodation.

I'm not sure that MFL will become an élite subject. Many young people "from the élite" (for want of a better term) are already bi or tri lingual at 18. MFL has not been a particularly élite subject, except perhaps at Oxbridge, for several decades as its labour market value is very poor.

@TenSheds As DD went 10 years ago to Switzerland, no doubt things have changed but her uni had links with Geneva. It was very well organised for Erasmus students at the uni snd early application got her into a brilliant uni flat. Views of the Alps from her balcony. I’ve no idea about working there though. Had your DDs uni got links with any Swiss uni?

Im not sure all language assistants go to uni as well as work. Many are in the middle of the countryside without access to a link uni. Again, when DD was at uni, the unis students attended had links with the uk uni and no one applied for British Council and a uni. They were not just random choices of unis students fancied. Although the Oxford uni Italian thread shows not all unis have MFL links.

As for work being overseen by the uni here - they absolutely did say certain types of work (if that was all dc were doing) wasn’t good enough. It was a question at uni open day. It’s quite another matter to go to uni and work as well. Of course that’s free choice.

@Ceramiq That is not correct. Many Erasmus students did have to find their own accommodation. Everyone in Italy and many in France. The unis didn’t have halls for uni Erasmus students from the uk. Few study Norwegian so what Norway does is small fry, As Erasmus was reasonably generous, it was possible to pay commercial student rents, as DD did in Italy. Students missing the deadline didn’t get a uni flat in Geneva. Commercial rents there are high but had to be paid. So it’s not universal that there is uni accommodation available abroad and no uni here gets it for you,

I have not claimed that it was universal - what I said is that in many Erasmus destinations there is assistance with accommodation and this is increasingly the case because it is getting ever harder to rent short term on the private rental market for overseas students, even within the EU. UK students wishing to rent privately in the EU will, like their EU counterparts wishing to rent privately in the UK, often need to pay the entirety of their rent up front so possibly 9-12 months rent in August/September of their year abroad.

@TizerorFizz You say your DD went to Geneva 10 years ago. That's an awfully long time ago, pre-Brexit but also pre all sorts of other changes to the International student market and the housing market. I appreciate that you are sharing your knowledge but it may not be up to date. It is frankly extremely expensive and complex for EU students to move to the UK to study now (hence numbers falling dramatically) and EU countries, understandably, apply the same complicated rules to incoming students from non-EU countries to incoming UK students.

It’s not the case for ANY uk student as there’s no Erasmus. What Erasmus gave was funding for accommodation. It did not guarantee accommodation. Many unis did not make Erasmus rooms available and didn’t have them.

If unis really believe anyone wanting to go abroad should get Turing funding at the expense of MFL students, it’s the death of MFL. Just yet more expense. MFL should be first for the money. Not a jolly to Australia because you feel like it.

It was certainly possible to do a year abroad in a MFL uni for engineering. DDs friend did this at a Grande Ecole. MEng with year abroad in France. Year abroad was equivalent of year 3 here and counted towards the degree, fully.

Not France, but another EU country. It took ages and cost over £500 to work with an immigration lawyer, to get all the paperwork sorted. I have heard of people doing it without a lawyer, and getting into all kinds of difficulties.
Applied for funding, but none available. DD was lucky to get accommodation via an alumni, but all the lease and contracts were not in English, which meant we had to get a native speaker to be able to translate.
It took over 6 months, including a trip to the country, as some paperwork could only be done in the country. The whole thing took over 6 months, but she is there and loves it. She is lucky that we saved in a uni pot for her, which tops up her funds.

Sadly I think your DD's experience is going to be typical, going forward.

@TizerorFizz We can have all the opinions we like but neither Erasmus nor Turing prioritize(d) MFL students' years abroad.

I'd definitely recommend trying to get a job as an English assistant (even if you don't like kids it's only 12 hours a week for about 800€, and you can ask work just 2 days a week so as to fit uni in

That's interesting @AlicePottery

DD is under the impression that it's uni or being an assistant. She's spoken to a couple of 4th year students who were assistants in France and they said it was dull/isolating as they were put into small towns.

DD is a city girl having grown up in a rural village!

Will try to get that list of possible unis off her today.

Language assistants generally get offered positions with little choice in the matter of location/school and they are often in rural/small town locations because those are the schools that require cultural enrichment. Paris schools don't have language assistants because there is plenty of access to English in Paris on the open market, including subsidised cultural centres.

Reading back over the thread: if your DD wants to be in a big city, being a language assistant (financially and administratively the easiest option for a 3rd year abroad now after the demise of Erasmus) is unlikely to allow that. She might get lucky with her placement and be near a university city but she would need to be prepared to suck it up if she was sent to a small out of the way town.

If your DD wants to be in a big city, the costs are potentially eye-watering (been there, done that...). Start budgeting now. I repeat, au pairing is a great way to get free accommodation/bills/food and it also requires the au pair to attend a course of study ie the family must allow for this.

For anyone applying for a visa for France, the Facebook group Applying for a French CdS (Carte de Séjour) and/or visa is a very useful resource. Note that the group admins have prepared a series of guides on FAQs, so will refer you to the guides if you ask a question that's been covered there.

For what it's worth, when my son needed proof of health insurance for his French internship visa, the Mondassur Gold policy was accepted. Ordinary travel insurance would not have been acceptable. This was a few years ago.

There isn't a requirement for students in France to have health insurance. They can choose to rely on the GHIC.

Of course you might feel safer if they had extra insurance but it's not a requirement.