You can find all the advice at Studying Aboard: 7 Things Parents Need to Know

Here are some of the tips:

Get Skype.

If you haven’t downloaded Skype on your computer, do it before your child heads abroad. My daughter called me almost every day on Skype so I feel like she’s never really left. She told me when we were driving home from the airport after her first semester in Barcelona that American students want to hear from their parents more when they are studying abroad because the emotional connection is important when they are living in a strange land. And that includes students who are normally quite self sufficient.

Start early.

Studying overseas requires completing lots of paperwork. The biggest pain for Caitlin was obtaining her student visa from the Spanish Consulate, which required a trek to Los Angeles with her file folder jammed with documents. Caitlin had double and triple checked the items she needed, but the consulate still rejected her initial visa request.

What was Caitlin’s omission?  As instructed, she had brought a statement from our local police department that stated that Caitlin wasn’t a criminal. A consulate worker told her, however, that this letter had to be notarized by government employees with San Diego County and the state of California!

At least Caitlin had time to collect the signatures and return to LA on another day. When we were waiting in the consulate’s lobby, a hysterical Spanish woman pleaded unsuccessfully for permission to allow her American husband to travel to Spain on their honeymoon despite a glitch in the paperwork.

Understand that college elsewhere is different.

Attending universities in Europe is more impersonal than in the United States. Caitlin attends Juniata College, a liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, where all her professors know her and they are always eager to chat and be helpful. Not so in Spain. Professors seem to give lectures and then call it a day.

Caitlin discovered just how unapproachable some of them are when she asked a professor at the University of Barcelona to write her a short recommendation. She needed it to apply for a grant to attend a political conference in Paris in the spring. The professor seemed shocked that Caitlin would approach him and he didn’t appear to understand what a recommendation was.

When Caitlin didn’t know the exact name of the grant program – and she hadn’t brought him a pen – he called her a “disaster.” Later, when they walked to the classroom where the final exam was held last week, the professor blurted out to the students, “It’s all Caitlin’s fault that I’m late.” Caitlin, however, persevered and got the recommendation she needed.

Encourage your child to take advantage of his/her surroundings.

It’s easy to attend school in a bubble. Americans tend to hang around other Americans. One of my daughter’s top goals in Barcelona was to ditch most of the Americans. One of Caitlin’s best Barcelona friends turned out to be a 60-year-old woman, who has taken Caitlin mushroom hunting and hiking in the Pyrenees. Caitlin has got herself invited to fondue, chocolate and dinner parties where she’s met people from Germany, Italy, Israel, South American and elsewhere. She’s learned about wild Spanish traditions of which I’d put el Caga Tio, the bizarre Catalan Yule Log, at the top of the list.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes college blogs for CBSMoneyWatch and US News & World Report.

A growing number of Americans are considering earning a college degree from up North. Actually, it’s not as far north as you might think because most Canadian universities are near the US border.

There are some hidden academic jewels in Canada, which explains why you might be interested in exploring their Northern options. You can find out more about Canadian universities in a college blog post that I wrote for CBSMoneyWatch this week:

10 Reasons to Attend Canadian Universities

Here are 4 of the reasons why you might want to consider Canadian schools:

1. Reasonable price.

The costs at Canadian universities will often be lower than at private colleges in the United States, as well as public universities for out-of state residents.  Americans will pay roughly $25,000 to $30,000 a year. That price includes books, incidentals and coverage in Canadian health insurance.

“For your bang for your buck, Canadian schools are an amazingly good quality,” Whitney Laughlin, a college consultant in Santa Fe, NM, and British Columbia.

2. Exchange rate often favorable.

When paying Canadian college costs, the exchange rate is typically favorable to the U.S. dollar, although it is currently trading at par.

3. Great quality.

Canadian post-secondary education is uniformly strong and much more standardized than in the U.S. Canadian universities offer a world-class education in some gorgeous cities, but they are under the radar.

4. Canadian admission process can be forgiving.

Canadian schools can be great for late bloomers. Strange but true: some Canadian universities, such as the University of British Columbia, only looks at 11th and 12th grade report cards when examining transcripts. If you messed up in the first two years of high school, it’s not a deal breaker.

You can find more reasons to check out Canadian colleges on my CBSMoneyWatch college blog.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes a college blogcollege blog for CBSMoneyWatch and another for US News & World Report. Follow her on Twitter.

Be health conscience. Eat a coconut every day.

I’m in Jamaica, where I’ll be the featured (and apparently heavily promoted) speaker at a first annual college conference in Kingston.

What could I possibly tell these Jamaican teenagers and their families about college? That’s what I was wondering when Sandra Bramwell-Riley, who operates Versan Educational Services, asked me to fly to Jamaica.

Sandra told me that there are a lot of American families who live in Jamaica and they are as clueless about their college choices as those living in the United States.

At a quasi press conference today with Jamaica journalists, I did mention that lots of colleges and universities in the United States provide financial aid to international students. Here is a list of colleges and financial aid statistics for international students that I find particularly valuable:

International Financial Aid

I haven’t seen a beach yet, but I have learned that student loans in Jamaica can be stunningly high. The concept of college loans is new in this country where there are no government student loans.

In extreme cases, parents, who can’t afford college bills, have sold their homes to be able to send their children to college. American families here have also made incredible financial sacrifices not knowing about the possibility of financial aid.

What really blew me away was hearing what the interest rate is on some private bank loans for Jamaican families – 19% and the pay back period is six years. And I thought private student loans in the United States were scary.

In other news:

The WSJ on Campus and Unigo.com are sponsoring a free webinar tonight entitled, The Secrets of College Admissions: What You Need to Know to Get In.

If I’m remembering correctly, only 5% of college students who study overseas stay for a year.

Caitlin studied at the University of Barcelona. I think living in Barcelona was a much greater experience that attending the gigantic — and rather impersonal — university that’s spread out over the beautiful city.

One of the benefits of living in Spain is that the rest of Europe is close by. Just for fun, I wanted to share a blog post that Caitlin wrote this week after she returned from a visit to the Czech Republic to see Walky, her high school/college friend.  It’s a very amusing post. You can check it out here:  Brno & The Czech Republic.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes for CBSMoneyWatch. Follow her on Twitter.

That’s the conclusion that I drew during our family’s two-week vacation in Spain and France. We were visiting my daughter Caitlin, who has been attending the University of Barcelona for two semesters.

During the vacation, I kept getting into conversations with Europeans about their universities. I had some knowledge about European universities, but the conversations reinforced what I already believed:

Compared to the European universities, Americans are very, very fortunate to possess their own unique higher-education system.

In Europe, a college education is cheap or even free and offer no frills. In Europe, you won’t find the cute liberal arts colleges where the classes are small and the professors are eager to be mentors. In Europe, classes are typically held lecture-style and professors don’t consider their roles to be mentors.  But size alone doesn’t explain the difference. Most Americans, after all, attend large state schools.

At the University of Barcelona and many other European universities, there is no central campus. The university buildings are scattered across the city. Lots of these buildings look more like office complexes. There is no heart of the university. No quadrangle to meet. No dormitories. No sports teams. No mascots.

In a subway in Paris, I struck up a conversation with a young Parisian attorney, who told me that he had gotten his MBA at the University of Chicago. He said he loved going to the University of Chicago and what he really appreciated was being about to touch his professors. I thought it was a curious choice of words, but Caitlin explained that from her experience in Europe the professors stand on raised platforms during lectures and their desk are equipped with see-through panels that separate them from pupils.

I also struck up a conversation with a physician in Great Britain, who had attended the University of Oxford. He said he wished that Great Britain offered liberal arts colleges as they do in The States. At Oxford, he only got one year to pursue a broad array of liberal arts before he was required to only take courses in his major.

We all like to gripe about higher-education in the United States, with cost being the No. 1 complaint.  I thought, however, that I’d give everyone a reason to feel fortunate that our children will be receiving their college degrees from institutions in this country.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch. Follow her on Twitter.

Further Reading:

German University: Roughing It In College

You can learn a lot during a college visit so you need to make the most of the opportunity. During a campus visit, here are 31 questions that you should ask:

College Graduation Track Record

• What is your four-year graduation rate.
• What is your five-year graduation rate?
• What does it take to graduate in four years at this school?
• What percentage of freshmen return for sophomore year?

Academics

• What is the average class size of introductory classes?
• How widely used are teaching assistants on your campus?
• What is the average class size of upper-division courses?
• Will a professor act as my advisor?
• How much time do students typically spend on homework?
• How much writing and reading are expected?

Academic Perks

• What opportunities are there for undergraduate research?
• How many students participate in undergraduate research?
• Is there a culminating senior year experience?
• Do you have an honors college?
• Do you have a learning community or other freshman experience?

Financial Aid

• What is your average financial aid package?
• What is the typical breakdown of loans versus grants?
• What is the average merit award?
• What percentage of students receive college grants?
• What is the average college debt that students leave with?
• What work-study opportunities are there?

Academic Support

• How do you provide academic advice to students?
• Do you have a writing center and how do I access it?
• What kind of learning disability resources do you have?
• What type of tutoring services do you have?

Student Life

• What kind of dorm choices are there?
• How many students live on campus?
• What percentage of the study body belongs to a sorority or fraternity?

Outside Opportunities

• How many students at the college get internships?
• What percentage of students study abroad?
• What type of career services do you have?

Lynn O’Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes a college blog for CBSMoneyWatch. Follow her on Twitter.