“Why not in Barcelona?”
When John W. Boyer became dean of the college at the University of Chicago three decades ago, few undergraduates, only about 40 a year, studied abroad.
In fact, Boyer recalled, doing so was discouraged. Students had a hard time using their financial aid abroad or getting credits for the courses they took overseas. “The thinking was that you were accomplished enough to get into the University of Chicago, so why would you go anywhere else?”
Boyer, a modern European historian who had lived in Britain and Germany, knew from his own experience that one learned to see the world differently through immersion in another culture.
He had an idea: Why not use Chicago’s distinctive common-core curriculum as a vehicle for study abroad? Because the courses would be drawn directly from the general-education core and taught by university faculty, concerns about quality would be allayed, and students wouldn’t face any difficulty earning credit.
Boyer’s pitch to his professorial colleagues: “If you teach European history in Hyde Park, why not in Barcelona?”
Five years into his tenure as dean, the Civilization Abroad Program began, taking a handful of students to France and Spain. At first Boyer faced detractors. “I was accused of creating Club Med,” he said. Soon, though, as returning students and professors shared their experiences, there was a waiting list to become faculty leaders.
Over the years, Chicago has built up a study-abroad infrastructure, with centers in cities around the globe, like Paris, Delhi, and Beijing, and a professional support staff. But the basic model has been little changed: Students spend an academic quarter abroad, taking mostly general-ed courses that allow them to fulfill academic requirements through a global lens. (There are also a few courses that meet more-specialized major requirements, like urban studies or neuroscience.) They also study a foreign language, although proficiency varies widely.
Small program sizes help build closer relationships between students and their professors, Boyer said. Many faculty leaders teach in locations that are tied to their professional or scholarly interests, and they have time to go to conferences, take part in workshops, and do research. Many apply lessons learned teaching abroad back in their classrooms. “It’s been a scholarly boon for our faculty,” said Boyer, who plans to step down as dean at the end of this academic year.
If lack of financial assistance had previously discouraged students from studying abroad, under the Civilization Abroad model, they do not incur costs on top of existing tuition and pay a program fee in place of on-campus room-and-board expenses. Those on financial aid receive a travel stipend for airfare.
Today, the demographics of students who go abroad mirror those of the student body. And 60 percent of Chicago undergraduates study overseas at least once. In the 2022-23 academic year, close to 1,000 students were slated to go abroad.
On the face of it, the Chicago and WPI strategies look distinct, one rooted in the liberal arts, the other in experiential learning. But as different as those approaches are, they are united by a common thread: Each is embedded in its campus’s signature educational model, a reflection of the institution and its values.
I’m always looking for stories about what it takes to expand or diversify education abroad. Share your best practices with me at karin.fischer@chronicle.com — and I may share your insights in a future issue of Latitudes.
