A Quantitative Estimation of Monthly Expenditure of...

Introduction University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC), ranking No. 2 in the most recent nation’s †Top 20 Research Institution† in number of interna- tional students, currently has 8,203 international students from 115 coun- tries, which making up 20% of her total student enrollemt, and welcomes about 2,700 new international students annually. China, South Korea and India are the top 3 countries where about 71% of the total international students come from.1 For every international student, financial issue is one of the most con- cerned factors when planning advanced education abroad. Usually, before the application process, international students should already ensure their†¦show more content†¦1 Data from UIUC official website: www.illinois.edu. The survey concludes that for twenty years, accommadation stays as one of the main concerns expressed by students going abroad, and â€Å"its cost also rep- resents an important part of the monthly expenses, which largely depends on facilities provided by the host institutions† (Carbonell, 2007). In the book â€Å"The interntional students’ handbook: living and studying in Australia†, the author Danny Ong (2009) ranks the expenditure of international students in order of importance: accommodation, food expenses, direct university ex- penses, essential cost, indirect university costs and personal/entertainment expenses. Claire Callender and Caroline Kempner (2000) in their research paper for DfEE2 states that the largest item of expenditure for all students is living cost, which absorbed about two-thirds of full time students’ aver- age total expenditure, followed by accommodation cost, participation and related cost and expenditure on children. They also point out that spending was constrained by income: part-time students spend more than full-time ones; the older spend more than the younger (Callender Kempner, 2000). The reason why Callender’s ranking of accommodation is different from the others has something to do with the different time period and countries where they conduct their research correspondingly. However, all of them rank