After a year in which the poor economy kept American students close to home, study-abroad participation rebounded in the 2009-10 academic year, according to the Institute of International Education.
Some 270,600 Americans studied overseas for academic credit, a nearly 4 percent jump over the previous year and a return, after that brief downturn, to a trajectory of growth. The number of American students going abroad has more than tripled over the past two decades.
A supplementary survey conducted this fall by the institute and the Forum on Education Abroad, a membership association of American and overseas colleges and independent education-abroad providers, suggests that the uptick in international study has continued. More than half of the 153 colleges that responded—including 110 campuses that send 100 students or more overseas annually—reported an increase in the number of students studying overseas in the 2010-11 academic year.
Thirty percent experienced declines, according the new survey, which is meant to give a more-recent snapshot of study-abroad trends.
Brian J. Whalen, the forum’s president, says a sustained drop-off in overseas study may have been averted by efforts by study-abroad offices and providers. More than a third of survey respondents said they had developed new foreign partnerships to help increase study-abroad enrollments, while another third reported negotiating additional bilateral exchange deals. Working directly with overseas institutions can often lower the expense of international study to students, Mr. Whalen notes.
At Beloit College, in Wisconsin, as many as three-quarters of the 125 students who go abroad for a semester or academic year do so through exchanges or directly enrolling in foreign universities, says Elizabeth Brewer, the college’s director of international education. Striking agreements with overseas institutions gives students more and less-expensive options, but such relationships can be tricky to manage, Ms. Brewer says. Among the headaches are matching curricular offerings and preparing students for a classroom culture that can be very different from that in the United States.
Shorter Stays
While overseas partnerships are on the rise, an even more popular strategy for colleges hoping to boost study-abroad numbers is to offer more short-term faculty-led programs. Some 60 percent of those surveyed this fall said they had added new faculty trips to head off enrollment declines. In 2009-10, more than half of all students traveled internationally on programs of eight weeks or less, according to the Institute of International Education figures. (Fewer than 4 percent went abroad for an entire academic year.)
Short-term programs are typically less pricey and more accessible to part-time and working students. But they are viewed with dismay by many in the field, who say they are too brief to allow students to become immersed in another culture and often amount to little more than academic tourism. “A few weeks in January is not going to make for the next generation of global citizens,” says Allan E. Goodman, the institute’s president.
If more students are opting to go abroad for a January term rather than for a junior year, there are other hints in the latest data that the face of overseas study is slowly changing. For one, 14 of the top 25 destinations were outside Europe, and 19 were countries where English is not the primary language. The number of students going to India increased a whopping 44 percent, while Brazil, Israel, and New Zealand also saw double-digit gains.
Mr. Whalen led a workshop in Delhi last month for 40 Indian universities interested in playing host to study-abroad students. Still, many Indian institutions lack the capacity and infrastructure to accept extra students from overseas, he says.
Despite the sharp jump, fewer than 4,000 U.S. students went to India in 2009-10, and it lags far behind favored destinations like Britain, Italy, and even China.
I. Job Thomas is director of the South Asian-studies program at Davidson College and has been leading a semester-long program in India for more than 30 years. Organizing such a program takes a great deal of work—not only does he have to deal with the academic content, he also has to handle health and security concerns. “If you want to make sure that something will get done in India,” says the Indian-born Mr. Thomas, “you have to make sure you’ve planned for everything that can go wrong.”
More Engineers Abroad
Even as interest in India soared, the number of students heading to a perennially popular destination, Australia, dropped by more than 10 percent in 2009-10, a fall-off many observers attribute to the strength of the Australian dollar and the expense of traveling to and living Down Under. Michael Steinberg, executive vice president of IES Abroad, a nonprofit overseas-study provider, says Australia may be particularly sensitive to economic fluctuations because it tends to attract students who more recently decided to spend time abroad and who haven’t spent years learning a foreign language to help them do so.
Interest in Australia was mixed in the fall survey. Thirty-five percent of the respondents reported increased enrollments, 31 percent noted declines, and 34 percent saw no change.
Meanwhile, 41 percent of those surveyed said the number of students going to Japan had dipped, following the earthquake and tsunami there. Study abroad to Japan had been on the rise, climbing nearly 7 percent in 2009-10.
In another sign of international study’s shifting demographics, the number of foreign-language majors going abroad dipped slightly, while the share of engineering students studying overseas surged more than 25 percent.
Getting more students from engineering, as well as from the hard sciences, to study internationally is a longstanding challenge. Although the profession has become increasingly global, it has often been difficult for students to find time in extremely structured degree programs to travel abroad.
At the Georgia Institute of Technology, where a majority of undergraduates major in engineering, one solution has been to send students overseas during the summer, when travel won’t disrupt their strict sequence of courses. During the most recent academic year, 43 percent of Georgia Tech students studied or worked abroad.
Amy Bass Henry, executive director of international education, says the university relies on faculty members to design and lead programs, like one in industrial engineering in China and Singapore. A greater emphasis by professional organizations has helped convince professors of the importance of an international experience, she says. The accreditor of college engineering programs has even made global education part of its criteria.
The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor three years ago started an international minor for engineering students, which includes foreign-language study and a required international experience. Amy Conger, director of international programs in engineering, says it’s now the most popular minor among engineering students.
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