And not just to the usual locations. “There’s no denying the cultural wealth of London and Paris,” says John Sunnygard, director of the Center for Global Educational Opportunities at the University of Texas at Austin. “But they’re not the only places on earth.” Monique Brantly, a Spelman College senior who recently returned from a semester in Ghana, exemplifies this shift. “I wanted to see something really different,” she says.
Many students are satisfying their wanderlust by picking from the increasingly varied menu of shorter study-abroad programs. Purdue sophomore Emily Thompson went on a 16-day study trip to Egypt. “It was fantastic,” she gushes. “I would love to go on more trips.” Thompson insists she felt perfectly safe in Egypt since “there were police all over the place.”
That may not reassure nervous parents. Some study-abroad programs have been cut back–in Israel, for example. But the rest of the Middle East wasn’t a big draw for Americans, and college administrators are working hard to keep their other destinations safe. “If a USC student travels abroad, and he and his parents feel he is in harm’s way, we will let him come home” without losing credits, says vice provost J. Michael Thompson.
Only a fraction of those students who initially express an interest in going abroad actually do so. Premed and engineering students find it hard to break away, and others are intimidated by the prospect of testing their foreign-language skills. But there’s also a growing realization that international experience matters, especially for business students. The bottom line is that studying abroad is more than just a lark; it can truly open doors.
