On the other hand, there's 10,160 German students studying full time in the US at a higher nominal price from a 4x smaller population. Perhaps sometimes the cost premium is worth it? Especially if you can get others to pay it via scholarships.
If your field is cultural then yes studying in the country in which it is more pertinent makes sense (Why study Japanese literature in Italy just to illustrate). But if your field is technical, or removed enough from local culture then looking around makes all the sense in the world.
But frankly there is plenty of schools that I regard as highly as MIT, CMU and such that are Europe (Polytech Paris, Poly Lausanne, Normal School of Pisa, Poly Milan, ... I am forgetting a lot) or Asia (Tokyo Tech) and while you might need to get a loan for some costs it will never get to US levels (I studied in Unis in Italy, France and Japan to get my BS and MS and all my loans were exactly EUR15000 by the time I found a job ... I had part-times and Scholarships but those were not hard to get, and I had declared bankruptcy I could have gotten rid of those since I took those loans in Europe).
I got my undergraduate degree at UW, needed no loans at all (that was a different time though).
I made a slight profit in my final year at Harvard, combining financial aid with 5-10 hours a week of part-time work.
Obviously it was nice for me, but it's sort of gross, in that the kids who need aid least (based on future earning potential) get copious amounts of it, while others are (in my opinion) scammed into onerous, non-dischargeable loans, with lower earning potential to boot.
A lot of Germans just want to experience life the US. Others want to improve their English.
That said, I understand that if the top school for your sub-field is in the US why you would want to come to the US for graduate school.
You can watch German TV here:
mediathek.daserste.de/sendungVerpasst
Start with "Die Sendung mit der Maus" on Sundays :)
Usually German is classified in the second most easy category for native English speakers to learn.
http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang...
I Ich
real real
is ist
that das
hard hart -> schwer
learned -> gelernt
in in
the den
and und
student Student
university Universität
has hat
had hatte
years jahre
lessions lektion
On the plus side, German has no sounds English speakers should find difficult to pronounce, nicely regular word order and a fondness for compound words which are as simple to remember as they are long, but by the standards of European language groups the vocabulary really isn't that similar.
Lamp lamp Light licht Arm arm Hand hand Finger finger
Often words that are spelt weirdly in english (compared to how they're pronounced) make sense when you know the way they're pronounced in German e.g. eight (acht).
The only real complications are to do with declensions (nominative, accusative, genitive, etc.), subject-verb-object syntax, and composed words. But any programmer who can work in different programming languages will find those rather easy to learn.
I I
learn learn
English Englisch