I’m an American who just started my first year of undergraduate studies at the National University of Singapore last month. I chose Singapore over the US because I wanted to live abroad, and Singapore checked pretty much every box for me: it’s in Asia, tropical, safe, developed, and English is the medium of instruction.
Now, even though NUS is a great university by global standards, the reaction I’ve gotten from many of my family members and friends is that choosing to study abroad as an American is inherently a downgrade, regardless of the university or country. That’s where my question comes from.
For context, I’m an American. Your family and friends share the opinion of a lot of Americans, including employers. So they’re right in the sense that an US degree would make it easier to get a job in the US after you graduate. That said, there’s no reason to think American universities actually provide a superior education or experience. If anything, very much the opposite the way our country is going. Academia is being targeted and defunded. If I were starting college now, I’d be delighted to be doing it outside the US and I’d network like hell to build a career overseas so I never had to come home.
Ivy League schools have degraded into expensive diploma mills. Students feel entitled to As, grade inflation means As are now class averages. I have colleagues at Ivy League schools complaining students don’t even show up to lectures but they have huge pressure to give ridiculous marks, because they are customers.
The only thing driving institutional success was research from foreign post docs and now they are all gone.
To add a counterpoint, the jobs that like to see American universities over foreign ones might be employers that would be prejudiced in other ways, too, and you may be better off dodging that bullet. Some employers do value the experience that comes from studying in a foreign country.
Depending on what job you are applying for, your portfolio, skills, and experience are going to be more important than where you went to college, so long as you got a degree from an accredited university and HR can check that box.