In order to increase and diversify the number of American students who study abroad, K-12 educators, nonprofits and universities must pursue strategic partnerships to reach students from diverse backgrounds while they are still in high school.
That was the message that Gretchen Cook-Anderson, director of diversity recruiting and advising at the Institute for the International Education of Students, or IES Abroad, delivered Monday at the Institute of International Education’s 2016 Summit on Generation Study Abroad. The summit is part of a multi-year effort to double the ranks of American students who study abroad by 2020.
“If a student does study abroad at an early age, high school, for example, that’s a strong indicator of their potential to study abroad in college,” Cook-Anderson said at a workshop titled “Early Bird Gets the Worm: Creating a Pipeline of Diverse High School Students into College-Level Study Abroad.”
Cook-Anderson touted a new Chicago-based partnership that IES Abroad has pursued with Global Glimpse, a nonprofit that provides study abroad experiences to American high school students—primarily economically disadvantaged and nearly half of them first-generation college students—by taking them to Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic or Ecuador.
The organization does more than just take students abroad. It brings students together from different backgrounds, such as it did in this video called “Diversity Matters,” when it brought together students from The Bronx and a suburban Connecticut town to go abroad together to the Dominican Republic in the summer of 2015.
Students reported afterward that the experience shattered stereotypes they had about each other as they both went to visit the foreign country.
Despite the benefits of studying abroad in high school, it’s not a foregone conclusion that such students will continue to do so in college.
