Nowadays kids are wanting more and more out of their college experience. Gone are the days when students cast their gaze within domestic boundaries while making plans for college. An increasing number of college students are factoring a semester abroad into their college agenda, and are venturing into further, more exotic lands than are usually trekked upon in the traditional European study abroad program, according to a recent article. Schools are expanding their abroad programs in order to meet their student bodies’ globetrotting desires. The Times article also says that a growing number of students are migrating to the Far East for abroad programs in China.
In the 2006-2007 academic year 11,064 students voyaged to China for their study abroad programs, while only 1,396 students made a similar journey abroad eleven years earlier in the 1995–1996 school year. In the 2006-2007 calendar year, 241,791 college students dispersed amongst various abroad sights throughout the world “with sharp increases in the numbers going to Argentina, South Africa, Ecuador and India, and declining numbers going to Australia and Costa Rica.”
Before going to the university, British students are encouraged to take a gap year out of school for travel and charity work, but America is too busy trying to shove everyone along through school so they can go out in the business world and succeed. America’s an ever prideful country whose arrogant notions and lack of deeply-embedded culture have traditionally led us to overlook the significance of such “sissy” endeavors. Why on God’s green earth wouldya ever go abroad when we got Budweiser, Stetson, and real football here in America?
The shift from twelve years at the same school in Oklahoma to NYU is plenty abroad for me, but especially for kids studying abroad can be a once in a lifetime opportunity and truly enlightening experience for a lot of students, especially ones which have never really left the States.
Overseas Education Consultants 