When Messiah College senior Courtney Allen went to study abroad in Panama in 2013, she wasn’t concerned with earning academic credit.
“Really I wanted to get out and see the world and be able to serve people,” Allen said.
Through a campus-based organization called A Revolution of Missional Athletes, or AROMA, Allen visited Paraiso—a city just outside Panama City—where she lent her accounting skills to an organization called Rio Missions.
The Messiah softball player has since gone back to Panama every summer to do the same—relying on fund-raisers to finance her travel—and plans to do so again this summer after she graduates with a degree in accounting.
Allen represents part of what the Institute of International Education refers to in a new report released Wednesday as a growing number of students who pursue a variety of non-credit educational activities overseas.
The report, titled “The World is the New Classroom: Non-Credit Education Abroad,” found that roughly half of the 227 institutions of higher education that responded to a survey reported an increase in the number of students who participated in non-credit education abroad for the 2012-13 academic year over the previous year.
“Students have a strong interest in experiential learning outside of the traditional classroom model, and not receiving academic credit does not appear to be deterring them,” said Rajika Bhandari, deputy vice president for research and evaluation at the Institute of International Education, or IIE for short.
