The latest in the New York Times’ Global Education series is an interesting article called Going Off to College for Less (Passport Required).

Worth a read, but here’s the fairly straightforward main point: “Expatriate education is expanding. This fall, at the National Association for College Admissions Counseling conference in Seattle, where admissions officers from American universities mingle with the counselors who help shape high school students’ college choices, there were representatives from the University of Waikato in New Zealand, Seoul National University in South Korea, Jacobs University Bremen in Germany, the University of Limerick in Ireland, as well as dozens more from Canada and Britain.”

European and other international universities are now actively recruiting American students, for a few reasons, chief among them the fact that American students will pay full tuition (roughly the equivalent of out-of-state tuition at an American public university).

Sounds fun, don’t it? Going for your undergrad degree at a fantastically far away, prestigious, romantic place like the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. If you’re of the college-choosing age and have the means, look into it. One downside built into many corners of the European university experience is a stark difference in teaching philosophy from the (ideal) American hands-on teaching method:

“[O]ther Americans say they have been less than impressed by a system in which there are few assignments, and there is almost no help from professors. ‘Feedback on essays ranged from very little to none,’ said Ben Wilkofsky, a philosophy student at Edinburgh. ‘There is no feedback on exams.’”

Oh, those steely European professors with their neatly trimmed beards and disdain for getting to know their students. Thank you for making the rest of us feel better.

It’s counterintuitive at first glance, but the online college student experience actually compares and contrasts pretty cleanly with the international university adventure. A high rate of personal feedback from your professors, a wide yet very detailed set of subjects to study and courses to take–and, perhaps best of all, the ability to experience a very unique kind of student freedom: the freedom to study when you want, where you want, and earn your degree efficiently.

It may not be so romantic as the student freedom that you might get from being an 18-year-old roaming the halls and city of Edinburgh, but, for those of us who have adult life already underway–who have, in other words, a specific degree to earn and a successful career to start as soon as possible–being a student of a top online university can be a very freeing thing. Go here to find the online college and degree program that’s meant for you.