by Martha Diaz
Oops! I want to go home!
Abroad in the World
Foreign-study programs may not be rigorous, but students aren't complaining
By Jay Mathews
Sunday, November 9, 2003; Page W21
Like most Americans my age, I didn't travel very far as a child. Neither did I have any opportunities to study abroad when I was in college. There was that Friday-night trip to Tijuana my freshman year, but it was pretty frightening, and not something from which I derived any academic benefit.
It is very different for my children. Each of them worked or studied outside the country while in high school, and when my daughter was looking at colleges last year, the tour guides were selling overseas programs as if they were time shares in Boca Raton.
I asked one undergraduate at a selective private university how much learning happened during these foreign adventures. He smiled and called them "a great opportunity to go on what is basically a 10-week vacation." That may be typical. According to the New York-based Institute of International Education, nearly half of all undergraduate and master's degree students studying overseas choose short-term programs that last less than a semester. There are summer trips, internships and something new to me -- the January term (sometimes called J-term or winter term), a few weeks between fall and spring semesters that colleges use for special programs.
Jen DeMinco, who graduated from Glenelg High School in Howard County and is a senior at Elon University in North Carolina, spent three weeks in Australia for a J-term film studies course.
"We attended the Flickerfest Film Festival in Bondi Beach, received a lecture from the cinematographer of 'The Lord of the Rings,' toured Australia's national film archive and Sydney's Fox Studios," she says. She saw the Great Barrier Reef, had a water tour of Sydney and visited the Taronga Zoo. "I learned how to surf in Bondi Beach, polished my clubbing skills, went sky diving in Cairns. I felt like I was on vacation in paradise."
For a while, I was the harrumphing father, dismissing this as scholastically suspect stimulation for an already over-entertained college generation. The top four study-abroad destinations are Britain, Italy, Spain and France, just the vacation spots my wife and I dream of visiting once we escape our tuition-paying penury.
But as I thought about it, I realized there is something admirable and encouraging about this trend. In just the last 10 years, according to the Institute of International Education, the number of American students of college age or older studying abroad has more than doubled, from 71,154 in the 1991-92 school year to 154,168 in 2000-01. That is only a small percentage of the 9 million full-time undergraduates in America, but it is an important trend. The institute has found the J-term trips lead to longer and deeper overseas study, like DeMinco's later semester in London studying British history and theater, and doing a film internship. American study abroad is still going up, despite the travel scare after September 11, 2001.
And increasing numbers of those young people are going to places without beaches, or even plumbing. In the last 15 years, the portion of students heading for Europe has declined, while trips to Africa and Latin America are up. "Americans want to discover the world," says Allan Goodman, the institute's president and chief executive officer. "I think 9/11 was a wake-up call on many levels that we need better understanding of what life is like, what the issues are." Even travel to the Middle East is increasing, he said.
Jill Pasquarella, a Barnard College senior, studied gender and development in the West African country of Mali. She commuted to lectures in the capital, Bamako, each day in a sotrama -- a green van with wooden benches stuffed with people and the occasional goat. She spoke French in class and with her host family, while trying to improve her Bambara, the local language.
She is a religion and human rights major, and wanted to do her research project on Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam. So she talked a local Sufi leader into letting her put on a long robe, cover her hair with a scarf and follow him around. "I prayed with them all day long," she says. "That is pretty much all they did." She wrote a 25-page paper in French and then went back to Manhattan, she says, thoroughly changed.
Experiences like these aren't necessarily beyond the means of the average college student, depending on where they choose to study. DeMinco spent $4,800 in extra travel costs for her trip to Australia, but her semester in London cost the same as staying at Elon, plus a cheap round-trip air ticket. Pasquarella spent less in Mali than she would have at Barnard. With the airfare and shots it came out even, she says.
Whatever is drawing our young people overseas, it isn't costing that much more than tuition, and the return on the investment could be enormous. There has never been a moment in history in which our influence on the rest of the world has been as great, or our understanding of it less adequate.
Next time I see my daughter, I will ask if she is thinking about studying abroad, and try to ignore her accusatory stare as she remembers my sounding off about tuition-paid vacations. Instead, I will quote Pasquarella on the time she spent in Mali: "If I learned as much every semester as I learned in that semester, I would be so smart!"
Jay Mathews covers schools for The Post. His e-mail address is [email protected].
� 2003 The Washington Post Company