No way of knowing how much they will go up for foreign students. Significantly, I imagine.

Perhaps they will come down for 'foreign' students I looked at my old Uni in the UK and it was ~3K for UK people and ~23K for foreigners. I doubt there is a cap on how much UK universities can charge for overseas students and they effectively help subsidise the UK ones.

So here in WA in looks like $9K fees per year for in State uni verses sending him home at $34K per year. Even with a 4 year course I think we're keeping him here.

There is a lot of extra hidden costs if your child is an international student. My daughter went to uni in Canada...the shift in the exchange rate meant we were paying much more after the first year or so. There's also flights home at what is normally the most expensive times of the year....also emergency visits.

No way of knowing how much fees at US public universities will go up either. For example, the U of California system has quadrupled fees (to almost 10k) in less than a decade. With Americans' aversion to the word "tax", it's pretty clear where the trend is going:- to more and more of the cost being placed on the student. That said, I agree with others that the cost of going to a British university is likely to be higher than the cost at a US public university (or a private one with a decent chunk of tuition paid through scholarships), assuming that graduation happens in not more than four years.

Out of interest, does the UK student visa allow overseas student to do a sandwich course, i.e. with a year in industry in the UK? (Obviously this doesn't make any difference for UK citizens who are resident overseas).

In my experience, it does if the placement year is considered an integral and mandatory part of the course, such as medical student experience etc. If it's something that the student just chooses to do then it's much more of a grey area and I don't know the answer.

Can't say for everywhere...but I did industrial design at Brunel, loads of foreign students and they did placement years and you had to go find your own placement for 6 or 12 months depending on which course you were doing.