News & Advice

For Gen Z, Study Abroad Is About Way More Than Drinking Through Europe

With a greater global awareness than generations before them, college students want to effect change as they travel.
Quito Ecuador
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Before she landed in Quito last spring, Julianna Connelly had never been outside North America. Though she hadn’t considered living there before, a study abroad program in the city offered Connelly a chance to take classes in Spanish, so she decided to travel 2,801 miles from her hometown of Indianapolis to Ecuador's capital, where she lived with a septuagenarian host mother for four-and-a-half months.

“Everything ended up working out,” says Connelly, 21, who will graduate in 2020 from Indiana University with a double major in English and Spanish. “People say you’re the captain of your own ship—you get out there, and it’s your job whether you sink or float. I think I ended up floating.”

For the 2016-2017 academic year, 325,339 students from the U.S. studied abroad for credit, a 2.3 percent increase over the previous year, according to a 2018 report from NAFSA: Association of International Educators. And while the number of U.S. students studying abroad ebbs and flows each year because of price, course availability, and number of enrollees in higher education, experts say no matter how many people are studying abroad, there are distinct, generational factors that inform how students are choosing their programs.

For Generation Z, with birth years ranging from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, that driver is experience. It's the kind that will help students gain real-world exposure to subjects like social work and public policy, move forward toward their degree, and stand out for a job, says Amy Ruhter McMillan, the senior associate vice president of marketing at IES Abroad, an academic consortium of American colleges and universities with more than 400 study abroad programs around the world.

It was largely for these reasons that Benancio Rodriguez, 22, studied abroad in Madrid for half a semester. Not only would he be able to practice his Spanish, but he’d be able to pick up a Spanish minor to add to his biochemistry major at the University of Michigan. “The experience has made it so much easier to be able to flip back and forth between the two [languages],” Rodriguez says. So much so that he’s considering returning to Spain for a master’s degree in science.

Gen Z’s decision-making is also influenced, unsurprisingly, by the internet: they have grown up in a society where around-the-world access is just a tap, scroll, or like away. After all, there's a reason K-Pop boy band BTS hit No.1 on Billboard music charts, and Swedish teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg has a worldwide cult-like following.

“The world has always been small to them,” says Ruhter McMillan. “They’ve always been on social media; they’ve always seen things in real time. You see things about Paris, and you hear news about Hong Kong, even if you’re not looking for it. In the old days, you would never get that on the Channel 7 News. There’s a global awareness that is much different than other generations.”

More so than millennials, Gen Z students are driven by "mission," with considerable optimism about the change they can effect in the world. These ideas about affecting change play out in their academic decisions, too. When selecting their study abroad program, Ruhter McMillan says students in previous generations would lead with location first: I want to go to London; I’ve heard amazing things about Tokyo. Gen Z students, for their part, tend to weigh place and program with equal measure.

Lydia Knorp (left) and Michelle Luu (right) were both drawn to Costa Rica, in part, for the country's conservation efforts.

This rings true for Michelle Luu, 21, who chose her four-month program in Monteverde, Costa Rica because of the country’s conservation efforts. “They are seen as quite a model for the rest of the world when it comes to their amazing biodiversity and abilities to protect it,” says Luu, an environmental studies major who will graduate from Haverford College in Pennsylvania in 2020. “I knew I wanted to do a program that would show me things that I wouldn't be able to see in the U.S.”

Likewise for Lydia Knorp, 20, who, for her study abroad internship, rode two buses from her host family’s apartment in the Santa Rosa neighborhood of San Jose, Costa Rica, to La Carpio, the city’s most “infamous shantytown” each day. There, Knorp worked at a community center for children, where she’d plan lessons and go on house visits with her supervisor, a Costa Rican woman.

“At the time, my internship was really difficult for me, learning about the sexual and physical abuse that these kids experience,” says Knorp, a junior social work major at Valparaiso University in Indiana. “But it really forced me to grow and figure out what I believe about a lot of things in the social work field, and how change can best be approached.”

In addition to boosting emotional development, studying abroad has tangible benefits: participants are twice as likely to find a job within 12 months of graduating. It’s no wonder, then, that in recent years, some schools have even made it mandatory. Goucher College in Baltimore, Soka University of America in Aliso Viejo, California, and Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, all require their students to have at least one “study away” experience.

At Susquehanna, which implemented the requirement in fall 2009, more than 90 percent of students choose to study abroad instead of at another school in the U.S., says Molly Roe, the university's director of global opportunities. The school’s institutionalization of the study abroad experience meant Susquehanna could increase financial aid for participation in programs. Through their ongoing Passport Caravan program, funded by alumni and friends of the university, Susquehanna even brings passport agents to campus and funds passports for students who do not have them. Last year, they “gave away” 200.

Because of the school’s requirement and support, 21-year-old junior Becky Vernachio, who will graduate in 2021 from Susquehanna, says it was “really easy” to prioritize studying abroad. Vernachio, who is majoring in German and secondary education, has studied in Freiburg, Germany, since February. And though her time there is nearly up, she's confident her experience will stay with her long after she returns home.

“There have been so many times in the midst of daily life where it hits me again; that I am actually in Freiburg, living and thriving, and that I actually get to experience all of this,” says Vernachio, who is planning to become a German teacher. “Sometimes it feels like a dream that is too good to be true.”

Though much of Ruhter McMillan's current work is consumed by Gen Z students, she knows the next generation—Generation Alpha—isn't far off, with lives and decisions shaped by Siri and Alexa and all sorts of artificial intelligence. What that means for the study abroad experience, she's not quite sure.

"Is that going to help us in terms of showing why study abroad is good, or is it going to hurt us if there are a lot more things that are inauthentic?" she says. "Hopefully it's not that you can pretend study abroad in virtual reality. Or maybe that’s good, too, in a different way. As long as it doesn’t supplant having relationships with people, and putting yourself out there and being vulnerable. It’s just a really interesting philosophical projection."