Travel as Education: Required Study Abroad?

I started out studying Environmental Engineering in college. Then I found out that I wouldn’t be able to study abroad unless I could afford to take an extra year to complete my degree - so I switched to Journalism and Spanish Literature and went to school for a semester in Chile.

Perhaps this was a rather dramatic reaction (I also wasn’t really enjoying the Engineering school, at all) but it also seems to me that the general lack of encouragement to study abroad that exists in certain departments and colleges across the country represents a critical failure of the US higher education system. In a world that gets smaller every day, shouldn’t study abroad represent an important, if not required, element of any complete college education?

Aside from the whole global village, world-is-flat issue, in my experience there is almost no better way to learn than by traveling. Traveling requires you to make complex plans and fast decisions, think differently, and deal with unfamiliar situations.  You will often need to learn at least a little bit of a new language, try new foods, and experiment with new ways of living life.

Of course, there are ways to travel abroad to the most exotic of locations without exposing yourself to a single lesson-learning moment, and there are ways to challenge your thinking without leaving your home town. The point is simply that travel tends to present people with great potential for learning opportunities, as Gary Arndt describes in his recent article on what he learned while traveling around the world. “Three and a half years and 70 countries later,” he explains, “I’ve gotten the equivalent of a Ph.D in general knowledge about the people and places of Planet Earth.”

The educational value of travel should be considered as a potentially essential component of the US higher education system. In a world of increasing interconnectivity and diversity, having some experience and understanding of another culture and a different language is an important element of being able to interact with and relate to other citizens of the world.

Americans in particular could certainly use some encouragement to travel: although sources vary, the number of Americans who hold passports seems to be somewhere around 20 percent, which has almost certainly increased dramatically since the new requirement to have one to visit Mexico and Canada took effect. There are a number of reasons why Americans may travel less than others, as Gary Arndt describes:

“Americans don’t travel overseas as much as Brits, Dutch, Germans, Canadians or Scandinavians. There are some good reasons for this (big country, short vacation time) and bad ones (fear and ignorance). We don’t have a gap year culture like they have in the UK and we don’t tend to take vacations longer than a week.”

While it’s certainly true that factors like geography and employment policies are hard to change, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do something about changing other factors that could increase travel. Promoting college study abroad programs would be a great way to begin shifting the American approach to travel while simultaneously improving the quality of our higher education system. Depending on the program and the college, study abroad can even be cheaper than a regular semester at school, with many of the more affordable programs offering great insight into a very different way of living.

Check out a recent study abroad trip to Spain, record your own experiences on Everlater, and share your thoughts on traveling and learning with us in the comments here or on Facebook!