Hard to believe, but it’s true: Only 1% of students from the US study abroad each year.
Is it that American students aren’t interested in studying abroad or that they encounter too many obstacles–including financial challenges–that prevent them from doing so?
Whatever the reason, US Congress took a big step toward improving study abroad opportunities for American students yesterday when it introduced the Senator Paul Simon Study Abroad Foundation Act as part of the House Foreign Relations Authorization Act.
The purpose of the act is to establish public-private partnerships that will achieve four broad goals:
1. Increase American students’ participation in quality study abroad programs;
2. Encourage diversity in student participation in study abroad;
3. Diversify study abroad sites, especially in developing countries;
4. Make study abroad an integral part of the American higher education experience.
The bill was actually introduced last year and enjoyed bipartisan support in the House and Senate, but the Congressional session expired before the bill could be passed.
Full information about the bill can be found here.
If you’d like to support the bill, you can join the Movement for Study Abroad on Facebook.
Community Connection:
Do you know about Matador’s study and live abroad blog, Matador Abroad? Whether you live in the US or elsewhere, you can find a rich archive of articles on study abroad subjects there!
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10 Comments... join the discussion!
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I agree that there are a lot of changes needed in all levels of America’s education system, but why not make study-abroad promotion one of them? The figure that’s the basis for this article is kind of appalling. I would have guessed 15-20%.
ps julie – i had no trouble with the title
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I don’t find the stats surprising at all, but very disappointing! Studying abroad was one of the best things that I have ever done and now I look to teach abroad. I think we would have less international conflicts if we all spent more time visiting other countries and learning other cultures, languages, traditions and histories. I support this bill!
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Correct me if I’m wrong but, admittedly while not as shockingly low, isn’t the number of Americans with passports also very low? Could be correlated?
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Good points, everyone! And Troy, yes, the number of Americans with passports is quite low.
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I wonder what the percentage is for Canadians…when I finished highschool I don’t remember even hearing about this as an option, so it’s definitely something that needs to be promoted more. Of course, that was quite some time ago now, maybe things are different?
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I’m not sure how unusual my undergrad (Dal) was among Canadian schools, but study abroad was pretty common there. I had friends who went everywhere from Senegal to Cuba to New Zealand to Malta, Malaysia, Swaziland, and on and on.
There’s a big “but” coming though: there were extra costs associated with a semester or a year of study abroad, and an academic price to pay too — a full year of study abroad usually meant extending your degree to five years, because most often your study abroad credits were useless as far as prereqs for your specific program went. A one semester study abroad was tricky too because it made it impossible to take any year-long prereqs that year. So, to put it delicately, the kids that went on study abroad often a) didn’t have student loans to worry about, and b) weren’t necessarily too concerned about their academics. (The exception was the international development crowd.)
The long lead-up, planning-wise, hampers things too. For myself, I didn’t make plans (late in first year or early second year) to go abroad in third year because I was a classics major and my full-year language prereqs (Greek and Latin) wouldn’t allow it. But by the time third year rolled around, I’d switched to African History. So a study abroad experience in Africa would have been ideal…
It’s certainly an imperfect system! It’s encouraging to hear it’s being taken seriously now in the US.
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I wish I could have studied abroad while in school. I’m still in school right now, but I only have one semester left, and finances are too tight to try it out. Too bad this wasn’t done sooner. I definitely would have taken the opportunity.
But who knows. I may end up going to graduate school, so the opportunity may just come my way.
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Great news – study abroad is such a powerful educational experience for high-school and college students.
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The statistics that we’ve found pubilshed are that 55% of US college students polled say that they are interested in and at some point would like to study abroad. And only 5% of those US college students do end up studying abroad. Multiply the two and this comes out to 2.75% of all students.
The main reasons most don’t go, as has been stated, is funding. Some people actually decide to skip studying abroad and instead go traveling abroad for several months after graduation, which can be a low cost alternative……
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