Global Themes for Intentional Recruitment and Fundraising

The United Nations Headquarters in New York

Faculty leaders need to appeal to at least two key audiences when designing and promoting a faculty-led program. The first is the students themselves (and their families), who are choosing among an increasingly large portfolio of high-impact learning opportunities (not just other education abroad options, but internships, research, and service-learning programs. The second is the university itself: the dean who signs off on course credit, the education abroad office that facilitates logistics and compliance, and advancement staff and donors who determine scholarship funding opportunities. Programs with generic itineraries that explore “cultures” vaguely often struggle, and deservedly so, to make their case to either audience. Programs designed intentionally around recognizable academic themes tend to do much better.

Research published in the Journal of International Students on a short-term China program found that a theme-based interdisciplinary curriculum, one built around a handful of "great questions,” helped students develop stronger critical-thinking and global-awareness skills than a program with a standard itinerary. A well-chosen theme is not just a marketing ploy but genuinely better pedagogy. I’ll highlight five of the most widely used themes in faculty-led programming today and describe why each one tends to drive both student recruitment and institutional support.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals

1. Grand Challenges

The Grand Challenges framework traces back to the National Academy of Engineering's 2008 list of fourteen challenges clustered around sustainability, security, health, and "the joy of living." Well over a hundred U.S. universities now run a Grand Challenges Scholars Program (GCSP), a competency-based track that lets students from any major build their coursework, research, and travel around a challenge they choose. Because the framework already has national brand recognition and an alumni network attached to it, students often see an immediate resume payoff, and donors see a giving opportunity connected to a prestige network rather than a one-off trip. Georgia Tech's Grand Challenges Global Experience (GCGX) is a strong illustration: a five-week, six-credit faculty-led program in South Africa pairing a course on "Sustainability, Technology, and Policy" with one on "Foundations of Leadership," explicitly marketed as a chance to encounter all seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals in an Global South context.

2. UN Sustainable Development Goals

Adopted in 2015, the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals now function as a shared vocabulary across governments, NGOs, and universities, which is partly why they work so well as a program theme. Nearly every issue your students are already curious about (climate change, clean energy, health equity, AI and the digital divide, gender equity, peace and justice) maps directly onto a named, numbered goal. That gives faculty a legitimized vocabulary to say "your interest already has a global framework," rather than needing to invent one. For administrators, SDG alignment also feeds directly into institutional rankings such as the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings gives advancement officers a familiar frame for pitching ESG-minded corporate and foundation donors. Georgia Tech's GCGX program again serves as a useful model here, since it is dual-branded around both Grand Challenges and the SDGs, a reminder that these themes are best treated as complementary rather than competing.

3. One Health

One Health is the transdisciplinary concept that human, animal, and environmental health are inseparable. The framework gained enormous visibility during COVID-19 and remains a magnet for pre-health, pre-veterinary, public health, and environmental science students. It also tends to be one of the more durable donor relationships available, in part because the alumni base most drawn to it—physicians, veterinarians, public health professionals—already appreciates the need for further scholarship funding for health education. Mississippi State's Tropical Veterinary Medicine and One Health program, run in partnership with Uganda's Makerere University since 2014, is a good long-run example. It draws veterinary and non-veterinary students together each summer and is supported by a dedicated college committee that reviews student applications for funding assistance. Ohio State's Global One Health Initiative and Oklahoma State's One Health course in Mexico follow a similar pattern, pairing clinical fieldwork with a framework that donors in the health professions readily recognize and want to fund.

The City of Quito was among the first twelve UNESCO World Heritage Sites

4. UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Of the five themes that I present here, the UNESCO World Heritage Sites perhaps are most recognizable to students before they ever matriculate, serving as excellent models for admissions or prospective students presentations and materials. Framing a program around World Heritage status opens the door to humanities, art history, and preservation-minded donors and alumni and can anchor a signature program for the institution as a whole. Central Connecticut State University's program in Salerno, Italy pairs Italian-language instruction with coursework built around the region's UNESCO sites along the Amalfi Coast and offers dedicated scholarships alongside it. The graduate World Heritage Studies program at Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus–Senftenberg, developed in cooperation with UNESCO's World Heritage Centre, was the first program in the world designed entirely around the UNESCO World Heritage Convention.

5. ESG and UN Global Compact

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles, formalized through the UN Global Compact, are now mainstream in business education and corporate hiring alike, which makes this theme especially effective for recruiting business, finance, and pre-law students who want a program that reads as career capital rather than an elective. It is also the theme most likely to unlock corporate donors: alumni in finance, consulting, and industry are increasingly asked to demonstrate ESG literacy at work and are receptive to funding programs that build it in students. The University of Washington Tacoma's "ESG in London: A Global View" program exposes students to sustainable-reporting practice through direct engagement with business professionals in a city at the leading edge of ESG disclosure requirements. On the donor side, Middlebury's Green Education Fund, which expands sustainability-focused scholarships for students studying at DIS Copenhagen and Stockholm, is a clear example of a named philanthropic fund built specifically around this kind of thematic programming.

A campus’ common read text can serve as a fantastic theme for a faculty-led program tie-in

Local and Institution-Specific Themes

Not every effective theme has to be a global framework. A campus "Book of the Year" common-reading program, a named institute tied to your university's strategic plan, or a signature research center can work just as well, if not better. The underlying point is to tap directly into something students already share as well as into internal funding lines, such as a common-read committee or provost's office.

Practical Considerations

A few suggestions for faculty leaders considering this program design approach.

• Name the theme explicitly in your course title and marketing rather than burying it in the syllabus

• Map your itinerary's site visits directly onto language your administration already uses in its strategic plan

• Talk to your advancement or development office before the program launches rather than after, since a named theme makes for a much easier named scholarship

• Don't be afraid to combine two themes to widen your appeal to both students and donors at once.

Regardless of how intentionally designed a program may be, of course, students ultimately commit to a program because they trust the faculty leader first and its curriculum or location second and third. It helps inordinately, though, to start the design process with a wider context in mind to help ensure the program’s ultimate, and sustainable, success.

Recruitment Strategies for Faculty-Led Education Abroad

In-person promotion always surpasses virtual interaction

A decent percentage of faculty leaders excitedly propose new or repeat programs each year, secure the necessary approvals, and ask their education abroad offices to monitor applications with the expectation that they’ll naturally roll in. If a program fails to generate enough student interest, the faculty member’s instinct may be to conclude that the international office didn't do enough to promote it.

That said, as many education abroad professionals know, their offices cannot serve as the primary engines of recruitment for a faculty-led program. Research on education abroad participation, along with years of practitioner experience, points to a clearer conclusion. Faculty engagement with students, through personal relationships, visibility, and enthusiasm, is the single biggest driver of applications to short-term faculty-led programs. Education abroad offices can extend that reach but cannot replace it.

Practitioners who work closely with faculty-led programs consistently find that direct, in-person contact between a faculty leader and prospective students outperforms virtual or office-mediated outreach. Presenting in person in their own classes and colleagues' classes, attending education abroad fairs, or hosting in-person information sessions is far more effective than a virtual webinar.

A 2015 study in the Journal of International Education Research proposed a framework showing that students' intentions to study abroad are shaped heavily by their expectations of personal, intellectual, and professional growth, which are expectations built through relationships and reinforced messaging, not brochures (Bandyopadhyay & Bandyopadhyay, 2015). Citing earlier work by Salisbury and colleagues, the authors argue that positive beliefs about study abroad need reinforcement at multiple levels, explicitly including faculty who lead the trips, not just education abroad advisors or staff.

A separate student-recruitment model published through ERIC makes a similar case from a marketing angle: for the experienced program leader, recruiting and promoting a program are treated as essentially synonymous activities, with faculty knowledge and visibility functioning as the core “sales” mechanism rather than a supplement to it (Lukosius, “Marketing Study Abroad Programs”).

direct Faculty engagement with students is the main driver of program recruitment

Students want a relationship, not a brochure

Short-term programs ask a lot of students in a short window: program fees, a break or summer, and ultimately a measure of trust that things abroad will be handled well. For many students, this trust attaches to a specific person before it attaches to a destination or a course description. A ten-minute pitch delivered in person, by the actual faculty leader, to a captured audience in a relevant class students, tends to do more work than any flyer or webpage ever will achieve.

Faculty can’t outsource their own enthusiasm

An education abroad office manages a portfolio of dozens of programs across every discipline on campus. Few staff members can match a faculty member's depth of feeling about their own subject. Faculty leaders should explicitly share their own background and experiences, their passion for the destination or subject matter, and personal travel stories during any presentation. Authenticity is an essential avenue for trust. A generic slide about “cultural immersion” cannot compete with a professor explaining, in their own words, why a specific place changed how they think and see the world.

Faculty of color recruit differently—and it matters

Faculty identity must be part of the recruitment strategy to target diverse participants, as well.  Research on inclusive excellence in education abroad notes that the presence of faculty of color has been linked to stronger outcomes for students of color in other academic contexts. Identity-based mentoring—while sometimes an uncompensated burden faculty of color are asked to carry, to be fair—carries genuine weight with students deciding whether a program is “for them” (Sweeney, 2013, Frontiers).

A widely cited example comes from the University of Texas at Austin, where a faculty-led program built in partnership with the university's diversity office attracted primarily low-income, first-generation students of color. The program's leaders point to word of mouth—participants telling siblings, cousins, and classmates about their experience—as a major driver of continued interest (Inside Higher Ed, “Expanding Opportunities for Minority Students to Study Abroad”). Separate research on Black students' experiences with education abroad marketing has found that finances, family, and faculty support (not to mention a fourth “F,” friends) are recurring factors—sometimes barriers, sometimes enablers—in whether underrepresented students apply at all (Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad). Faculty relationships, whether based on shared identity or not, aren't incidental. For many students, they're decisive.

Collaborate with education abroad colleagues

In no way, though, should faculty sideline their education abroad colleagues. In most cases, offices can help organize information sessions, fairs, and parent presentations, manage scholarships and safety compliance; assist with intentional program design, and maintain student information and applications systems that faculty often can’t replicate alone. NAFSA's guidance on faculty-led programming frames program execution as a close, collaborative partnership between faculty and the education abroad office, not a handoff from one to the other (NAFSA, “Recruiting the Best-Fit Faculty to Lead Study Abroad Programs”).

Teaching is ultimately a relationship, so Faculty must leverage it for their students’ success

Practical recruitment strategies that faculty can use now

Direct, personal outreach

●       Present in person in your own and colleagues' classes. In-person sessions consistently outperform virtual ones.

●       Collect interested students' phone numbers, not just email addresses, early in the process, and follow up personally where appropriate.

●       Host informal drop-in Q&As during offices hours or designated times alongside (or instead of) a single formal information session.

Peers and alumni

●       Recruit former participants as student ambassadors. Their firsthand testimony, not to mention photos and videos, are often the most persuasive recruitment tools available, more so than any official messaging.

●       Encourage alumni to share about the program on their own social media channels rather than relying solely on institutional posts.

Institutional leverage used, not depended on

●       Ask the education abroad office for listserv access, fair tables, or parent-presentation slots, and treat these as distribution channels, not persuasion.

●       Ask faculty colleagues in related departments to mention your program in their own classes.

●       Build (or personalize) a program webpage that includes your own photos, videos, voice, and a direct note to students, not just office-template text.

Equity-focused tactics

●       Partner directly with your campus's diversity and inclusion offices and identity-based student organizations.

●       Lead with scholarship and financial aid information early, since cost is one of the most consistently cited barriers for underrepresented students.

●       If your own identity connects meaningfully to the program or destination, say so openly in your pitch—the research suggests this is a genuine draw for students, not a token gesture.

The most successful short-term programs abroad are rarely the ones with the flashiest brochure. They're the ones where a specific student can point to a specific faculty member as the reason they had the best experience of their college life through education abroad.

Artificial Intelligence and Education Abroad

It’s stunning how quickly AI is changing everyday life

It seems as if artificial intelligence comes up in nearly every conversation I have with my faculty and staff colleagues of late. Advisors wonder whether chatbots will eventually replace them. Instructors rightly complain that narrative assignments and application essays increasingly read mechanically and soullessly. Even worse, too many faculty members even have started utilizing AI to grade those assignments, outsourcing a key part of their roles that requires applied human judgment.

In a recent survey of more than a thousand U.S. faculty members, conducted by the American Association of Colleges and Universities and Elon University's Imagining the Digital Future Center, 95 percent worry that students will become overly dependent on AI models, and more than 75 percent responded that cheating has increased since AI dawned, with 57 percent saying it has grown significantly.

I’m not yet worried that the sky will fall around us, though. We've been here before with new technologies and already know how to adapt to use AI appropriately.

The last research paradigm shifter

What Wikipedia Taught Us

Twenty years ago, Wikipedia triggered a nearly identical panic. Many professors banned it outright, certain that free, crowd-sourced summaries would replace the hard work of reading primary sources. As historians, my graduate student colleagues and I fiercely debated how to control students’ use of Wikipedia in their written work. That said, as a fan of wikis as media and Wikipedia as a project, I argued early on that students use Wikipedia a useful first stop on their research journeys, not the last one. Good researchers use it to get oriented, learn new vocabularies, and identify helpful footnotes that lead to real scholarship.

Discussions about generative AI deserves the same reframing. AI is not the enemy of critical thinking but should be a welcome complement. Used as a starting point for brainstorming, AI models can deepen engagement with any project, including researching education abroad programs and making meaning from the experience. Just like Wikipedia, if users employ AI as an end point in place of their own writing or judgment, it absolutely does real damage to the learning process and communication generally.

As for education abroad itself, AI can help students, faculty, staff, and parents better design and benefit from short-term programs, which for a while now have comprised the majority of U.S. study abroad programs. IIE's Open Doors data shows that 64.6 percent of all students who studied abroad in 2016-17 did so on summer programs or those eight weeks or fewer in length, and NAFSA reports that short-term programs have continued growing in popularity since the COVID-19 Pandemic. Given how much of our contemporary lives, let alone our work in international education, now operates on compressed timelines, we should consider earnestly when and how to best utilize AI to further our goal of a more meaningfully connected world.

Regardless of how digital we become, faculty understandably may want to start off with a good analog map

For Faculty: A Curriculum-Design Partner, Not a Grading Substitute

Drafting a syllabus or short-term program itinerary from scratch is genuinely time-consuming work, usually done on top of a full teaching load, alongside departmental service, and without extra compensation. It’s no small feat to outline sound learning objectives, select the right location, draw up a scope for the study tour component,  identify pre-departure readings, consider reflective or experiential assignments—let alone market, teach, and lead a course abroad. AI is perfectly suited to the front end of this process. Models can generate an initial list of destinations that complement a curriculum, draft discussion questions tied to specific sites, or surface lesser-known local collaborators and partners at the location. None of this work requires trusting AI's ultimate judgment. It simply requires the critical assessment needed when reading the first draft of any student’s work. The Chronicle of Higher Education profiled faculty who use AI this way, describing it as something that works well when it functions as one of many tools for instructors, rather than a replacement for their judgment.

Where I’d draw a hard line is grading. Evaluating a student's growth, voice, and thinking is precisely the kind of judgment call that can't be outsourced to a tool that lacks a personal relationship with a student and no stake in their development. Even among faculty who use AI extensively, grading remains the most controversial application. According to a Tyton Partners survey cited in the Chronicle, about one in ten have used AI for grading, which to me is still shockingly too many. Faculty should critically employ AI to help a study abroad program but should allow it to decide what a student learned by participating in it.

For Students: A Launchpad, Not a Ghostwriter

An AI-generated application essay is the modern equivalent of turning in a Wikipedia article as an essay. It may appear at first glance to be original and complete, but the student failed to think and formulate ideas critically.

Interestingly, faculty and advisors often overestimate how students are actually using (abusing) AI in this manner. The Chronicle's own reporting found that while faculty focused almost entirely on integrity violations, students described using AI to summarize readings, brainstorm paper topics, and stress-test their own arguments by asking AI to find weaknesses in their thinking. In short, they are already adapting it as we adapted Wikipedia as past students. When used appropriately, for example, AI can help a student frame a short-term program’s basic cultural context, language learning resources, a working list of scholarship opportunities, or draft a list of questions to ask their homestay family. In every one of these cases, AI is pointing students toward better sources and sharper questions, like Wikipedia or past research tools.

Of course, as I’ve sadly experienced more than I care to admit, the personal statement or reflective essay is often where I catch students abusing AI models. Needless to say, when students turn to AI to write such an intentionally subjective narrative, they fail to struggle with finding their own voice amid the program’s curriculum and structure.

Education remains a human endeavor, after all

For Staff: More Time for Relationships that Matter

The fear I hear from many of our education abroad staff colleagues, though, is less about essays and grading than the preservation of their own roles as advisors. Some organizations are already launching AI chatbots can field student questions from appropriate programs to course selection.

This fear, though, is grounded in an impoverished view of advising. Advisors shouldn’t spend their time answering quotidian concerns like “What documents do I need for my visa?” for the sixteenth time that week. None of us sought professions in higher education for that task. We do so because we enjoy being part of students’ success and development. Advisors seek to mentor them through challenging decisions that shape how they see the world. NAFSA's own reporting on AI adoption agrees. AI tools neither do nor should replace the advisor but can meaningfully reduce time spent on repetitive tasks and add consistency to routine communication. Advisors then can be freed to spend more of their limited hours on the most exciting, dare I say most human, parts of their jobs. NAFSA has gone so far as to run an entire “AI-Enhanced Study Abroad Office” series exploring exactly this, including sessions specifically on using AI to strengthen global student connection through more personalized advising and engagement strategies.

If you're a parent reading this post, your worry may be whether your student is using AI to skip the preparation or reflection that makes study abroad transformative. It depends entirely on how it's used, just as it depended on whether a student actually read sources beyond a subject’s Wikipedia entry. Ask your student what sources they consulted beyond AI, the same way you might have once asked whether they'd read the primary source behind an encyclopedia entry.

Higher education professionals have survived new technological shocks before. Calculators, the Internet, and Wikipedia faced their share of detractors. The Chronicle cited a 1986 newspaper article in which a teacher described the calculator's “tremendous potential for destruction” of student math skills. Is that not similar criticism to what we hear today about AI models? Why hasn’t our focus always been on how to teach students the most effective ways to think critically and act ethically with any tool?

The institutions that will navigate this technological paradigm shift well won't be the ones that ban AI outright, nor will they allow it passively to replace human judgment in advising, teaching, or grading. They'll be the ones that draw a clear, shared line about where AI belongs in short-term education abroad: ideation, orientation, and efficiency. We didn't lose our research skills to Wikipedia. We just learned to stop mistaking an origin for a destination.

Beyond the Resume: Education Abroad for Career-readiness and Life

Preparing for a 21st-century career isn’t a linear process

Is International Education Worth It?

Every education abroad student that I’ve advised over the years has asked some version of the same question: Will this experience be worth it? It is a fair question. A program abroad potentially can cost a lot of money, distract from graduation requirements, or pose a trade-off against internships, campus jobs, or other life commitments. Students and families (and more indirectly faculty, staff, and university administrators) want evidence—not anecdotes—that their investment will pay off in an increasingly competitive job market.

That research evidence exists. It consistently shows that students who study abroad enter the workforce faster, earn more, and develop the precise skills that twenty-first century employers demand. The more interesting—and honest—story, however, is how students best develop those skills. The career advantages of education abroad are real, but they are a byproduct of more profound growth: the formation of graduates who are resilient, self-aware, and genuinely capable of navigating the unfamiliar. In a world defined by technological disruption and cultural complexity, these traits are among the most durable professional assets that students, employees, and citizens may possess.

IES Abroad recent graduate survey results

Career Outcomes Are Real and Measurable

IES Abroad's longitudinal career outcomes study —one of the most cited in the field—  found that 97% of more than 1,200 surveyed IES Abroad alumni between 2009 and 2011 had secured full-time employment within a year of graduation. During that same period only 49% of the general graduate population could say the same, according to a parallel Rutgers University study. IES Abroad alumni also earned, on average, $7,000 more in starting salaries than their non-study-abroad peers—a gap that held and grew in follow-up studies conducted through 2015.

The demand side of the equation is equally clear. A 2020 QS Global Employer Survey of 13,000 hiring managers and CEOs found that 25% of responding employers cited international experience as a recruitment priority, and 72% agreed that a second language increases candidate's appeal. Employers are not simply being polite when they say they value global experience; for a significant portion of them, it is a genuine differentiator at the point of hire.

The Institute of International Education's landmark report Gaining an Employment Edge: The Impact of Study Abroad on 21st Century Skills & Career Prospects (Farrugia & Sanger, 2017) provides perhaps the most rigorous national evidence to date. Drawing on a survey of more than 4,500 alumni of U.S. colleges and universities who studied abroad between 1999 and 2017, the report found that study abroad has a beneficial impact on 11 out of 15 "21st century workplace skills." The top five gains—intercultural skills, curiosity, flexibility and adaptability, confidence, and self-awareness—were reported by more than 70% of respondents. More than 50% also noted significant improvements in interpersonal and problem-solving skills.

These advantages are not limited to semester-long or year-long programs. A 2023 study highlighted by NAFSA found that 89% of short-term study abroad participants reported that their program actively supported the development of 21st-century job skills relevant to their professional and academic journeys.

Of course, many of these studies rely on alumni self-reporting and draw from populations that may already be motivated and resourceful. That said, the consistency of findings across institutions, program types, and decades of research is difficult to dismiss.

What the Data Actually Measure—and What They Miss

The skills that show up most consistently in these studies—intercultural competence, adaptability, curiosity, self-awareness, resilience—are not job-specific competencies. They cannot be taught in a single course or acquired through a credential. They are human capacities: the kind developed when a person is genuinely disoriented, must rely on unfamiliar resources, and experiences a greater sense of autonomy.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report identifies analytical thinking, creative thinking, and self-efficacy—defined as resilience, flexibility, and agility—as the three most critical employee skills. None of these are technical skills. They are qualities of character. They describe not what a person knows, but how a person acts when the world does not cooperate with their expectations.

Framing these as "career skills" is accurate but incomplete. Adaptability is not only valuable in a job interview. Intercultural empathy is not only useful in a global business meeting. Self-awareness is not only an asset on a performance review. These capacities are the substance of a full human life—the tools by which people form meaningful relationships, participate in democratic society, and weather the losses and reinventions that every life will eventually demand. What these career data are really tracking is the formation of people who have learned, in a deep and embodied way, that the world is larger than they thought—and that they are more capable than they knew.

Career skills are life skills

Integrative Learning and Self-Authorship

Qualitative research reaches the same conclusion from a different angle. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, one of the field's leading peer-reviewed publications, has documented these developmental outcomes across decades of scholarship. Work by Stebleton and colleagues (2016) frames education abroad as a "high-impact practice"—in the same category as undergraduate research, service learning, and capstone experiences—precisely because it fosters integrative learning: the kind that connects intellectual content to personal identity and civic life.

The Forum on Education Abroad situates this dynamic within a broader framework of self-authorship—the developmental process by which students move from simply absorbing the expectations of others to constructing their own values, relationships, and sense of purpose. Education abroad, when well-designed, is one of the most reliable catalysts of that process in the undergraduate experience.

Self-authorship matters enormously for workforce readiness but, of course, on a longer timeline than achieving one’s first job. The graduate who has undergone genuine disorientation abroad, who has had to ask for help in an unfamiliar language, who has revised their assumptions about what is normal and natural and correct, is not simply employable. They are adaptable. In a labor market experiencing unprecedented convulsions from artificial intelligence, automation, and geopolitical volatility, adaptability is the quality that will determine not just the first job, but all positions in perpetuity.

The Access Problem

Any honest treatment of education abroad must reckon with who gets to participate. Despite decades of documented benefits, NAFSA reports that only about 1% of all U.S. college students currently study abroad, with minority students remaining gravely underrepresented. If education abroad builds both career advantage and those personal capacities that constitute a flourishing human life, then its concentration among already-advantaged students is a foundational equity problem.

Institutions and policymakers that genuinely believe in education abroad's value have a responsibility to treat access as a structural priority. Scholarship programs, affordable short-term options, and proactive advising for first-generation and underrepresented students help ensure that education abroad's promises become available to everyone.

What Well-Designed Programs Do Differently

For faculty and staff designing programs, the research offers a clear practical message: intentional structure matters more than duration.

As one practitioner quoted in NAFSA's IE Magazine put it: "Employers value the international experience, but they don't necessarily know how to value it." That gap—between what students gain and what they can articulate—is where program design makes its biggest difference. Pre-departure orientation, structured in-country reflection, and post-experience advising that explicitly connects outcomes to transferable skills are what turn an adventure into an education—and an education into a career advantage.

IIE's research confirms that the career impact of study abroad varies significantly according to program characteristics, study destinations, and students' stated goals. A program built around intentional intercultural learning outcomes will reliably outperform one built around logistics alone.

Intentional design is itself a foundational life skill—whether for a career or trip

Conclusion

Students, parents, and advisors are right to ask for evidence. Students who study abroad enter the workforce faster, earn more, and develop the skills that employers across sectors say they most urgently need.

The deeper case for education abroad, though, does not rest solely on salary data. It rests on what it means to educate a person for a century in which the only certainty is change—in technology, in culture, in the global distribution of economic and political power. The student who has learned to be productively lost, who has had to rebuild their social world from scratch, who has discovered that their assumptions about how things work were revisable—that student is not just ready for a job. They are ready for a life.

The goal of education abroad was never only to produce a stronger resume. It was to produce a more capable human being. In this century, those two things are closer together than they have ever been.

Base Camps, Not Bubbles: Study Centers for Short-Term Programs

a good study center is a base camp for achieving the summit of a successful international experience

The “Immersion” Myth

It may seem as a given that, if you want students to experience another culture, you must “immerse” them in it. For many faculty, administrators, and parents, that meant foreign universities—ones with local students and local professors and local bureaucracies—not American-managed facilities overseas. Conversely, non-university study centers often seemed a compromise at best, a liability at worst. They kept students close and comfortable but just far enough from the place they'd come to study.

In one important and specific context, at least, this myth breaks down: the short-term program. Over the past decade, short-term programs of eight weeks or fewer have grown into the predominant form of education abroad. The IIE Open Doors Report confirms the trend: of the 298,180 U.S. students who studied abroad for academic credit in 2023–24, the majority did so on short-term programs, and that number represents a 6% year-over-year increase. NAFSA calls it one of the defining shifts in the field. For this population—students spending one to four weeks abroad, often for the first time—the question isn't whether a study center compromises the experience. It's whether, without one, there's a real experience at all.

The Bubble Problem Is Real—and Avoidable

Let's honor the skeptic's concern because it's a fair one. Study centers have, in their worst iterations, produced exactly what critics fear: programs where students sleep in American-managed housing, take instruction from American faculty, eat familiar food organized by American staff, and return home having skirted the actual country. The Forum on Education Abroad's Standards of Good Practice exist partly because this pattern is a pervasive one. The Forum's guidelines require programs to provide genuine opportunities for students to interact with host-country communities—not simply to locate students within a host country's borders.

This “bubble” problem, though, is ultimately one of design, not intention. A student at a foreign university on a two-week program can be just as isolated as one at a poorly designed study center. Without structured connections—to local scholars, community organizations, the everyday rhythms of a city—geographic proximity to a "real" institution may provide only the illusion of immersion. What matters is not where a student is but what they do once they’re there.

Why Short-Term Programs Need a Different Architecture

A semester student has time on their side. They can get lost and recover, fail at the language and try again, and, finally, stumble into a community by the third month that transforms the whole experience. The student on a 3-week program, of course, does not have that privilege.

This critique is often the main challenge lodged against study centers, but it is easily addressed through intentional design. NAFSA's professional resources on developing short-term programs emphasize that the logistical and pedagogical demands of short programs are categorically different from those of longer ones—and that faculty and staff must build the infrastructure required to support meaningful learning deliberately from the ground up. Without it, the short program tends to fail in one of two ways: over-managed tourism (a bus, a guide, a photograph, no conversation); or unstructured drift (students navigating a complex urban environment with inadequate support, spending their limited time managing logistics instead of learning).

A dedicated study center—when designed as a base camp, not a buffer—avoids both failures. It consolidates logistics, provides a stable physical home from which students venture outward, and creates the institutional slack that allows a short program to go deep rather than wide. Think of it the way climbers think of base camp on a mountain expedition: not where the summit is, but where reaching the summit becomes a possibility.

Immersion is a complicated concept—but one that is achievable through intentional program design

5 Design Principles for Intentional Study Center Design

The Forum on Education Abroad identifies education abroad as a high-impact practice—but only when intentionally designed. "The mere act of studying in another location," the Forum observes, "does not automatically create a high-impact educational experience." For a short-term center to serve students rather than merely house them, five design principles should govern every decision.

1. Immersion by geography

Where the center sits matters as much as what happens inside it. A center located in a working neighborhood—not an international hotel district—means students step outside into daily life every morning. Language policies, local transit, and proximity to markets, places of worship, schools, and public spaces are not amenities; they are the curriculum.

2. Economic reciprocity with the host community

This principle is the one most often ignored in practice. Study centers can have complicated economic footprints: they can enrich a local economy or extract from it, depending on how they're built and staffed. Best practice, as outlined in the Forum's Standards, requires that collaboration be "mutually beneficial" and that programs actively respect the cultures of the communities in which they operate. Concretely, this means hiring locally—not only for domestic functions, but for program leadership, cultural expertise, and instruction. It means sourcing from community vendors. It means asking, and honestly answering: what does this community get from our presence here?

3. Local experts as co-educators

The curriculum architecture of a strong short-term center flows outward from the facility, not inward toward it. Research published in Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad consistently finds that community-based engagement and collaboration with local informants are among the most powerful predictors of meaningful intercultural learning. Local scholars, environmental scientists, public health professionals, artists, and community leaders aren't visiting speakers to be scheduled around the “real” program—they are the program. The center's role is to cultivate and sustain those relationships so that each new cohort of students inherits an expert network rather than a blank slate.

4. Create residential community

Housing students together—and doing so in proximity to on-site staff—creates the informal learning environment that frequently produces a program's most enduring outcomes. Evening conversations, shared meals, chance encounters at the common table: these require physical proximity and are nearly impossible to engineer in dispersed housing arrangements. Faculty residence alongside students can also signal something important about the program's values: accompaniment rather than administration.

5. 24/7 staff presence

For students, parents, and institutions alike, the case for dedicated on-site support on short-term programs is obvious. NAFSA's training resources on short-term program management identify crisis management and real-time student support as among the most complex challenges facing short-term programs—challenges that a dedicated, on-site staff is uniquely equipped to handle. A student who encounters a medical issue, a safety concern, or an emotional crisis on a Wednesday evening needs a person, in the building, who knows their name. This is not a luxury—it’s the basic infrastructure of responsible care.

The participants—the students, faculty, and staff—are the most important elements of any short-term program

Conclusion

Initial skepticism about study centers is not off-base—it is, in fact, the appropriate starting posture for anyone building one. The risks are real: the bubble, the extractive economic footprint, the American-managed enclave that teaches students more about their own comfort than the local community. Even if they are not desireable, these outcomes are possible and should be named.

The Forum on Education Abroad's Standards of Good Practice for Short-Term Programs, the body of research in Frontiers, and the practitioner wisdom collected in NAFSA's Guide to Successful Short-Term Programs Abroad all point toward the same conclusion: a well-designed, community-rooted study center is not a compromise for short-term programs. For the student with limited time to understand something true about another part of the world, it may be the only architecture that makes that understanding possible. The base camp doesn't climb the mountain for you. Without one, though, you may never leave the trailhead.

Faculty and Staff Development Workshop in Panama

Learn From Travel is excited to launch its second annual Faculty Development Workshop, January 3rd to 7th, 2027 in Panama! You can register for January 2027 here.

Whether you’ve never led a study abroad program or led more times than you can count, you’re welcome to join us. We will build a fun and thoughtful learning community while immersing in Panamanian culture.

spotting a sloth in the canopy, La Mariola

Itinerary Highlights

Our itinerary includes:

• an interactive discussions on risk management, physical and mental health, and other faculty leader responsibilities.

• exploration of difficult topics such as slavery and colonialism during a historical tour of the UNESCO-designated town of Portobelo, a place of resistance and maronage, complete with with stories and artifacts of pirates, gold, and the famed Black Jesus.

• visit to a secluded beach where we will engage in a hands on exercise on risk management

• tour of the UNESCO-designated colonial Panama City center with discussion on engaging itinerary development

• visit to the Panama Canal for observation of massive ship passages from up close

• welcome and farewell dinners

Community-based highlights include:

• a dance performance and question and answer session with local Congo drummers

• an immersive visit to an indigenous Emberá village.

learning about the recycling project at Adifort, La Fortuna

Recap of Previous Faculty Development Workshop

This Panama tour follows our inaugural Faculty Development Workshop from in January 2026 in Costa Rica, which hosted fourteen faculty and staff members from six different institutions.

We began our journey with a welcome dinner and enthusiastic discussion in the city of Liberia, Costa Rica. The next day we boarded a private bus to La Fortuna. Along the way, we stopped at the stunning Café Macadamia, setting the tone for a week that balanced reflection, community engagement, and experiential learning.

In La Fortuna, we visited Adifort, a local nonprofit dedicated to supporting youth and seniors through education, wellness initiatives, and community programming. Participants learned how Adifort operates a modern swimming pool for seniors, hosts private events to generate income, runs a large recycling operation, and funds its work through the privately-owned La Fortuna Waterfall preserve. This visit sparked rich discussion around community-based organizations and how they often step in where government services are unable to help. According to one participant, “The discussions on why certain activities and places were chosen was very helpful in understanding the study abroad design process.”

Enjoying a chocolate tasting at North Fields, La Fortuna

Our final full day returned us to Liberia for a guided visit to the National University of Liberia, led by a local biology instructor. Highlights included research on stingless bees, a community playground, and even a hiking trail featuring edible termites, before concluding with a warm farewell meal at a local restaurant.

Overall, participants described the workshop as intentionally designed, informative and fun. We’re excited to see how this experience inspires the development of impactful future study abroad programs at their home institutions. One faculty member concluded, “The entire trip was excellent. I underestimated how impactful it would be to be a participant. It’s been fun reflecting on the trip.”

Register today for your spot on our next program in Panama!

The Complete Guide to Packing for Faculty-Led Programs (FLPs)

Let’s be honest: packing can be frustrating. Figuring out which outfits you should bring, and how many pairs of shoes you’ll need, all while trying not to forget the essentials like your passport, feels like an impossible task. And knowing what to pack for faculty-led programs (FLPs) can be even trickier, especially if it’s your first time taking part in a short-term study abroad program. 

Our complete guide to packing for FLPs covers all the essentials and non-essentials, making sure you don’t forget a single item before taking to the skies. We’ll provide practical tips on how to make the most of the confined space in your suitcase and by the time your trip rolls around, you’ll know exactly what to pack to make your experience an unforgettable one!

Why packing for FLPs is different

One of the great things about faculty-led programs is that they offer structure. This is a huge part of what sets the packing experience apart from any other trip, because you have a planned out itinerary provided in advance of your travels. This means you can tailor your packing based on the activities set out in your program. 

If you’re learning about Skiing and National Identity in Norway, with a full day set aside for adventure on the slopes, then you’ll definitely want to pack your base layers and waterproofs. And if you’re taking part in Sustainable Agriculture in Nicaragua, you might want to bring a pair of walking boots for the various wildlife walks and coffee plantation hikes included in our itinerary.  

Unlike your average trip abroad, you should also consider academic requirements, such as bringing your journal or laptop to make daily notes on what you’ve been learning. 

Our top 5 tips for smart FLP packing 

Before we get into our packing guide, we wanted to provide you with some useful preparation tips that will take your packing from jumbled chaos to coordinated order. Here’s what we’d suggest: 

1. Check airline baggage allowances early so that you know what you’re working with. 

2. Use packing cubes to organize your belongings and make it easier to find what you need when it comes to unpacking. 

3. Buy vacuum bags to maximize the space in your suitcase and carry-on. 

4. Practice packing early to see what works and what doesn’t, then revise your list. 

5. Leave room if possible, just in case you decide to bring back souvenirs. 

There’s definitely more to packing than pulling your suitcase out of storage and hoping everything fits. By following our advice, packing for your FLP should go off without a hitch!

What to pack for your FLP  

Knowing exactly what to pack for your FLP will depend on the destination and the program itinerary, so it’s always a good idea to review those elements first. Research the weather forecast for your chosen dates and read through each site visit carefully to fully understand what’s expected and this should set you on the right path. 

To help get things started, we’ve put together a collection of items for your consideration. 

Essential travel documents  

Key travel documents like your passport and visa requirements can often get missed when it comes to packing. On the morning of your trip, you’re so focused on where your headphones are and what the traffic is going to be like on the way to the airport, that you end up leaving your passport at home. Trust us, it has happened before–and will happen again! 

Check that you have the following at hand before you set off:  

• A valid passport 

• Visa or entry permits

• Travel insurance 

• Boarding pass and flight details 

• FLP program and paperwork

You might not need every piece of documentation we’ve listed, since not every country requires a visa or an entry permit, however you should always check these requirements just in case. 

Learn from Travel will provide you with all the relevant trip details prior to travel, so read through this carefully as it could help inform the rest of your packing preparation.

Keep essential documents like your passport accessible

Trip-specific clothing

Clothing is a tricky one. That’s because it all depends on the type of study abroad program you’ve chosen. Of course, you have the basics like underwear and sleepwear, but you also need to consider the climate, the activities you’re taking part in, cultural dress codes, and comfort, especially when it comes to adding in the rest of your outfits.  

Try to include: 

• Supportive footwear suitable for walking and being on your feet.  

• An additional pair of shoes for casual downtime. 

• Warm layers if you’re heading somewhere cold or a location with cooler evenings, like New York in the winter.  

• Light, breathable layers if your FLP destination is hot and humid like the Bahamas. 

• Modest clothing options for business formal, cultural, or religious contexts. 

• Waterproofs and thermals for cold and wet climates.  

• Swimwear for pools and beaches. 

• Accessories such as sunglasses, hats, a belt, scarf and gloves.  

This isn’t an exhaustive list and some items may not be relevant at all, just remember to be as smart as possible with the clothing you pack. Choose outfits instead of single items and try to find things that mix and match so you can create multiple looks without having to overpack. 

Toiletries and personal care 

Airline restrictions can be a nightmare. That’s why you should always double-check what you’re allowed to include before adding anything to your suitcase. 

For an FLP, here’s what we’d suggest: 

• Deodorant 

• Toothbrush and toothpaste 

• Shampoo and conditioner 

• Soap and body wash 

• Sunscreen and after-sun 

• Insect repellent 

• Hand sanitiser and disposable wet wipes 

• Basic first-aid kit 

• Hairbrush, comb and other hair accessories 

• Sanitary products 

• Make-up kit 

• Stomach medications or antacids

• Any prescription medicines  

You don’t have to pack everything we’ve mentioned here, but try to choose the items that work best for your trip specifically. And use travel-sized versions of everything, placing them in a ziplock bag for easy storage. 

Electronics

You’re obviously going to bring your phone with you, especially if it has a copy of your boarding pass and you’re using it to take those all-important pictures! But there are a few other tech items you might not have thought about. 

You might want to bring: 

• Smartphone 

• Laptop or tablet 

• Camera 

• Headphones 

• Universal power adapters 

• Power bank 

• Chargers for all the above 

Going on an FLP with Learn From Travel is all about immersing yourself in the culture of the country you’re visiting, so you probably won’t be reaching for your phone as often. However, it’s still a good idea to bring all the tech needed to capture the experience, whether that means making notes on your laptop in the evening or taking pictures of the picturesque landscape with your camera.

 Remember to pack a camera to capture those awe-inspiring moments

Faculty-led program resources 

Finally, when packing for FLP, you want to make sure you have all the necessary items to help with your learning experience. 

This could include: 

• A journal or notebook to jot down your reflections 

• Pens, pencils and other stationery 

• Reusable water bottle for long day trips 

• Light reading material related to your course 

If you’re unsure on what resources you might need for your specific FLP, you can always ask your faculty leader for further advice.

Your next adventure begins with Learn From Travel 

All packed for your faculty-led program? Or do you still have some questions about what to include for your specific trip? We understand that every destination is completely different and with itineraries full of immersive experiences, cultural exchange, educational workshops and historical tours, it can be tricky to get your packing right the first time. 

When you organize an FLP through Learn From Travel, we make sure you have all the necessary information about your trip prior to take-off. We take care of all the planning so that you have a truly meaningful learning experience and provide you with a detailed itinerary, that way you know exactly what to pack for excursion and site visit.  

Need some advice on our faculty-led programs? Contact Learn from Travel directly and we’d be happy to help.