Bringing Study Abroad back Home

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With the benefits of studying abroad well-documented, the number of college students looking to go overseas is on the rise. And across the country, colleges are meeting this new demand by building stronger, better, more comprehensive study abroad programs – some independently, and some with the help of EF Study Abroad. New partnerships are opening up previously unreachable campuses from Vietnam to Swaziland to U.S. students, and suddenly, the world beyond our borders has more to offer as a learning platform than ever before.

Visiting the Oracle at Delphi

No matter how you slice it, that’s great news. Now, writes Barry Glassner, President of Lewis & Clark College, in a thoughtful piece for the Huffington Post, we need to bring the experience back home up to speed. Too often, he says, students engaging in international study programs — year-long, semester-long or short-term, CST-style — return stateside with no outlet for their globally charged curiosity. These are minds fresh off a full-on intellectual reawakening, uniquely ripe for educational stimulation. In the right environment, and properly reintegrated into college life, they can really flourish. Glassner says the onus is on colleges, which after all charge hefty fees for stoking intellectual growth, to provide this environment, and the examples he sites are pretty encouraging. Like Glassner, I found the idea of connecting study abroad alums with K-12 students particularly interesting, but the whole piece is definitely worth a look.

Check it out here, and let us know your own ideas for bringing study abroad home.

Read our other academic related blog posts here.