Ryan Fazio freely admits: “I’m a perfect example of a guy who doesn’t go abroad.”
For starters, he dropped Spanish classes the first chance he got, after his initial semester at Northwestern University. He never picked up another language.
By the fall of his junior year, he was juggling a double major, in economics and political science, and was slated to take over as editor in chief of The Northwestern Chronicle, a weekly newspaper. His brothers in Sigma Phi Epsilon elected him president of the fraternity.
His life on campus was full, so why leave?
Many male students like Mr. Fazio don’t—women far outnumber men in study abroad. In the 2009-10 academic year, women accounted for nearly two-thirds of 270,600 American students going overseas. Indeed, the proportion of men studying overseas has remained the same—or flatlined, to put it less charitably—for more than two decades. What is it, educators wonder, about study abroad that resonates with women but not with men?
Some people chalk it up to the preponderance of women majoring in the fine arts, foreign languages, and other humanities heavily represented in overseas-studies programs. Others note that more women than men are enrolled in college in the first place.
But business students are now the second-largest group abroad (after those in the social sciences). Engineering, another male-dominated field, had record growth in study-abroad participation in 2009-10. The same year, the number of foreign-language majors overseas actually dipped. And even taking the overall gender-enrollment disparity into account, women still dominate study abroad.
Sending a broader cross-section of majors abroad hasn’t made a dent in the gender gap because, it turns out, women in those fields study overseas at rates disproportionate to their numbers. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, men make up 86 percent of computer-science students but only 71 percent of majors who go abroad. The engineering school even pitches study abroad as a way to attract more women to the discipline, says Amy Bass Henry, executive director of international education.
Nor have other efforts aimed at diversifying education abroad, such as offering shorter, cheaper trips and unusual destinations, had much of an impact. Whatever the cause, the trend worries many in the field, who believe that having an international experience is key to understanding and working with people from other cultures, a crucial skill set in an increasingly global and interconnected workplace.
“If half the population has less exposure to other cultures, it’s a disadvantage to them as individuals and to us as a society,” says Heather E. Barclay Hamir, director of study abroad at the University of Texas at Austin.
But Mr. Fazio’s story may encourage those wrestling with the problem. At the last minute, just days before the deadline, he decided to go overseas, to an English-language program in Prague. He spent the semester studying alongside four of his fraternity brothers.
“It was kind of a fluke I went abroad,” Mr. Fazio says, “but I couldn’t be happier that I did.”
Wired Differently
From its inception, more than a century ago, study abroad has had a reputation as a female pursuit, the lasting image one of Seven Sisters students steaming overseas for a grand European tour of art and culture, a refining gloss for a marriageable young woman. “Women were sent overseas to be culturally educated ladies who could entertain their husbands’ business partners,” says James M. Lucas, of Michigan State University, who has written extensively about men and study abroad. “The mantra became that study abroad is feminized and a dalliance.”
The gender imbalance is readily apparent to Kate Freyhof, a recent Gettysburg College graduate, who spent part of her junior year in Aix-en-Provence, in southern France. Perhaps one in 10 of her classmates, she says, was male.
Once back in Pennsylvania, Ms. Freyhof, who had so wanted to travel overseas that she saved her babysitting money throughout high school, teamed up with Samantha Brandauer, the college’s assistant director of study abroad. Half of Gettysburg’s students spend at least a semester overseas, but just 30 percent of that group is male. Ms. Brandauer and Ms. Freyhof wanted to know why, so they assembled a series of focus groups, male and female: those who had studied abroad and those who had stayed on campus.
The pizza-fueled discussions revealed what the two women dubbed the “bro mentality.” Male students were far more reluctant to leave their campus social groups to go overseas. Many, like Mr. Fazio at Northwestern, were more likely to do so if their friends were also going abroad. “I thought it was girls who went everywhere together,” jokes Ms. Freyhof, who now works as a study-abroad adviser herself.
Recent research suggests that the two sexes respond to different messages, and different messengers, when deciding to study abroad.
A University of Iowa study of some 2,800 students at two- and four-year colleges found that the more men interacted with their peers, not only the more deeply influenced they were by them, but also the less likely they were to go abroad. Peer interaction did not have a similar effect on women.
Thomas Bogenschild, director of international programs at Vanderbilt University, sums it up: “We can talk ourselves blue in the face, but they’re really going to listen to their friends.”
Parents, meanwhile, hold far greater sway over female students, concludes Jill McKinney, of Butler University, who conducted extensive interviews with returning female study-abroad students as part of her master’s thesis. They were likelier to go overseas if their parents were supportive, and likelier to be encouraged to go as part of “safe” college-sponsored programs rather than independently, she says.
Many of the women also reported that they wanted to have the experience of living and traveling abroad when they were in college because they believed they wouldn’t have that opportunity once they had work and a family to juggle, a view that left Ms. McKinney, associate director of Butler’s Center for Global Education, shaking her head: “They felt pressure to check it off the proverbial to-do list.”
By contrast, men are more inclined to question the value of an experience they perceive as “visiting museums with a professor,” says Mr. Lucas, who is assistant to the dean for international academic student life at Michigan State. They figure they can backpack through Europe with a friend or will have the opportunity to go overseas for work, he says. “They need to be told why culture is important, or they need to be given another message.”
Real-World Value
Mr. Lucas organizes short study-abroad programs for incoming freshmen at Michigan State. With his findings in mind, he writes different letters to male and female students to promote the trips. Women get the “traditional” message, which highlights the cultural and experiential benefits of going overseas, while the letter to men “makes it sound more like a privilege,” he says. “I tell them, ‘This is how you are going to distinguish yourself at a big university and, later on, in a global work force.’”
Emphasizing the practical, bottom-line benefits of an overseas experience is a strategy embraced by a growing number of institutions. That means offering programs not just in subjects tied to students’ majors but also in places they can see themselves working long-term. “No one is looking for a career in Florence,” says Daniel Riley, a campus-relations manager at CET Academic Programs, an independent study-abroad provider. By contrast, he notes that CET’s programs in China, which feature heavy doses of language instruction, are split evenly between male and female students. “Taking intensive Chinese for a semester is something men can see as valuable for a job,” he says.
Other institutions are expanding their offerings to allow students to work or hold internships overseas. There’s some evidence that such an option is more attractive to men, although not much more than study abroad. At Georgia Tech, 68 percent of the engineering students who study abroad are men, but they account for 71 percent of those who work abroad. And 87 percent of the computing majors who work overseas are male, slightly higher than their share of overall enrollment.
At Georgia Tech and elsewhere, study-abroad offices are forming partnerships with career services to help students better articulate the work relevance of education abroad. Such efforts are geared to those have already gone overseas, but Ms. McKinney, of Butler, says they also can send an important message to students who might consider doing so. At résumé workshops for students returning to Butler from overseas, she notes, students who have not gone abroad are increasingly in attendance. “I think they want to see what it means for their résumé, for their job prospects,” she says, adding that the sessions are “male-heavy.”
For another research study, Ms. McKinney analyzed the content of more than 100 study-abroad application essays submitted by male students. They saw going abroad as a résumé-builder, a networking opportunity, and even as a scouting trip for a possible career overseas.
Ads in ‘The Onion’
Still, there’s a question weighing on Ms. McKinney: Do male students who go abroad do so because they view it as more of a career credential than their male peers do? Or is study abroad simply not on the radar of most college men?
To make sure that men are getting the message, a number of colleges are expanding their study-abroad marketing with male students in mind. The University of Kentucky distributes brochures on gender and overseas study at key points around campus, like the academic-advising center. (Other pamphlets are aimed at students from underrepresented groups like racial and ethnic minorities and students with disabilities.) Brook Blahnik, director of study-abroad advising at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, advertises overseas programs in publications with a heavy male readership, like the sports section of the college newspaper and the satirical tabloid The Onion.
Mr. Blahnik and his colleagues are also careful to include more male faces and voices, whether on posters highlighting certain destinations, at study-abroad fairs and information sessions, or in student blogs and videos posted online. “It sounds really basic and simple,” he says. “But that subconscious message is important: ‘Here are people who look like me.’”
Kyle L. May Jr. hopes to spend six months beginning this summer in Australia studying sports management. Sydney is far from the North Carolina mountains, where Mr. May is a junior at Western Carolina University, but he has a friend to turn to for advice who went overseas earlier. He also has John Schweikart, a study-abroad adviser at the university, whom he met through his fraternity, Lambda Chi Alpha. “John just kept talking to me about where I wanted to go, what my options were,” Mr. May says. “He helped me figure out where would be a good fit.”
Bigger Than Study Abroad?
Men like Mr. Schweikart may be potent messengers to other men, but they are in the minority in the study-abroad profession. At American University, in Washington, one of the three male staffers, in an office of 10, has been reaching out to fraternities and athletics teams for the past three years.
Mark Hayes, associate director of education abroad, says the jury’s still out on the effectiveness of the staffer’s efforts. Women continue to outnumber men in all but three of the university’s study-abroad programs. “I try to take the long-term view,” Mr. Hayes says. “It may take a while.”
Increasing male participation may be the goal, yet another piece of research suggests that even if men go overseas, they may not benefit as much as women do. A study of nearly 1,300 students at various colleges who studied abroad found that women made greater gains than men in language proficiency and in their understanding of and comfort with other cultures.
Michael Vande Berg, one of the report’s authors, says there are ways to improve language and cultural learning for both men and women studying abroad that can largely erase the gender gap. “Men are trainable,” Mr. Vande Berg, vice president for academic affairs at the Council on International Education Exchange, says with a laugh.
Still, he acknowledges, it is important to ask what’s happening to men on campus—before they ever study abroad—that would lead to the gender disparity.
Mark H. Salisbury may have an answer. Now director of institutional research at Augustana College, in Illinois, he is an author of the Iowa report, the one that said men are less likely to go overseas the more they became involved with their peers.
Conversely, Mr. Salisbury and his co-authors also found that male interest in study abroad grew if they had more diverse experiences outside the classroom, such as interacting with people from different backgrounds on clubs or teams or in their dorms.
“Study abroad,” says Mr. Salisbury, “doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”
It certainly didn’t for Keaton E. Becher, who is studying now in Fribourg, Switzerland. He got the bug to go abroad after he met a foreign-exchange student, a woman from Sweden. Sitting down to write his application essay and map out his required study plan made him think more purposefully about how a semester overseas could further his goals of graduate school or a career in international development.
His feelings only deepened as he heard other students and alumni swap travel stories at reunions and football games. “If you study abroad, you’re connected with everyone else,” Mr. Becher, a junior. “It’s like you’re in a little club.”
That club? It’s at Wabash College, an all-male liberal-arts institution.
Correction (2/20, 10:58 a.m.): The top photo caption in this article originally stated incorrectly when Ryan Fazio, a junior at Northwestern University, studied in Prague. He is now back on the Northwestern campus, in Evanston, Ill., after study in Prague. He is not currently studying there. The caption has been updated to reflect this correction.
Correction (3/6, 11:34 a.m.): The article misstated the job title of Samantha Brandauer at Gettysburg College. She is assistant director of study abroad, not director of study abroad. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
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