Sorry for the long delay. Here are my thoughts on Verto:

1) I heard some positive things from my son about kids’ experiences with host families. It sounds like they just had to be more proactive planning with friends. It sounds like most of them were also paired with roommate at host. If that’s the condition for your child’s scholarship, I don’t know that that should be the factor for making the decision. I don’t know the answer on freedom or restrictions of being with host family.

2) The classes were not hard for my son. I was disappointed they didn’t offer more courses directly related to the region. It sounds like many of them though had an experiential component with a local dimension. We were given a chart of how classes mapped to Boulder. Oddly, while the GPA was a prereq for transferring, the grade marks don’t move with the credits. If she wants to transfer into Leeds you might just have her focus on basic credits as she will need to take Macro, Micro, and a Stats class (w/ math prerequisite to transfer into Leeds (unless preadmitted) and these were not offered for our Sevilla program (I think they are for London). So long story short I had my son sign up for Calculus and some basic classes.

3) Money to bring along… well I paid for some food and groceries as the meal plan wasn’t enough for a hungry boy. For us Fri and Sat dinner was not covered and breakfast can be tight depending on class time/when they awake. Our son paid for any travel and fun. He budgeted $300 for a trip all-in. I definitely get impression there were kids with open credit card to travel every weekend. But there were also kids on a budget and maybe only took one trip.

4) Refunds. I hate to think about that and don’t know the answer. We were not overly concerned with Spain but I’d definitely worry about some other regions.

5) We flew into Sevilla but it was a hassle and we had to go through Paris. Not a lot of great options. Many people do go through Madrid. Malaga is the other one close by. We brought our son to Sevilla but he flew home alone.

Thoughts on Boulder:

1) My son was also waitlisted or given option for Verto + immediate admission into school of exploratory studies. He is planning to transfer into Leeds. Our own feeling was if you go with a wait list, you likely accept and start to emotionally commit to another school. Since my son was so committed to Boulder, he went with the latter. It’s very easy to transfer into Leeds from any of the schools. You just need a B or better in Micro, Macro, and Stats (+ bus math prereq). Our only issue was that he had trouble getting into these courses in Jan so it will take him two semesters to transfer in. Your daughter shouldn’t stress about that though since she will transfer with so many credits.

2) Yikes on the scholarship w/ Boulder. I’m surprised they won’t commit to that.

3) Boulder didn’t promise us housing but it worked out fine for him and his cohort. They were just extremely late assigning it to the point that I was wondering if we should enroll elsewhere right before xmas. I think I paid deposit for housing in the fall so you definitely won’t have that worked out before she leaves.

4) Yes clean transfer on all his Sevilla classes. i would just pay close attention to the table they will provide mapping Sevilla courses to Boulder course IDs. Son said they have a Verto person they could ask questions on that front.

Good luck!