The Costs of Study Abroad
A project of the Study Abroad Learning and Cost Alliance
Excerpts from the Project Proposal
Project Three, GLCA: The Costs of Study Abroad
In the international, intercultural environment of the twenty-first century, the growing consensus both within and beyond higher education is that significant engagement with at least one other nation and culture should be part of students’ liberal arts education. To serve this expectation in a time of increasing financial constraints and uncertainty – and to ensure that students’ experience of study abroad contributes to the desired liberal arts learning outcomes – higher education institutions must increasingly conjoin their decisions about study abroad programs with considerations of cost.
The Costs of Study Abroad Project seeks to build a stronger foundation of understanding – among faculty and staff of individual colleges, and among a wider range of higher education institutions – about the costs that an institution incurs in supporting study abroad. This project will provide an important complementary perspective to insights gained from the Learning from Study Abroad and Expanded Contexts for Liberal Arts Learning projects outlined in the two previous sections of this proposal. As the two projects described above identify elements of study-abroad programs that have pronounced impact on the liberal arts learning outcomes, the Costs of Study Abroad (CSA) project will offer important perspectives on the cost implications of providing such qualities.
Study abroad has become a source of growing concern to liberal arts colleges and universities as they seek to balance commitments to international and intercultural education with the costs of delivering such commitments. Colleges are increasingly putting financially-driven constraints on student’s ability to participate in study abroad (e.g., fees to be eligible for study abroad or limits on the number of students who study abroad).
The growth in student numbers, combined with the increase of costs and concerns about program quality, have brought to a head the dilemma that study abroad poses for liberal arts colleges and universities. Costs continue to escalate, both for institutions that operate their own programs abroad and those that allow their students to enroll in programs run by other higher education institutions or study abroad program providers.
An analysis conducted in 2005 as part of the Global Partners Project, a tri-consortial initiative funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation involving the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA), the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM), and the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS), estimated that the 42 liberal arts colleges of these three consortia collectively paid over $30 million per year to send their students to third-party study abroad program providers – a figure that averages to over $700,000 per institution in direct costs. Adding to that the indirect costs of a campus study-abroad program office and other related operations can easily bring the cost to over $1 million per year – a substantial expense for a small independent college, particularly one with a smaller endowment and fewer means.
As undergraduates confront an array of choices among study abroad programs, an equally compelling concern of liberal arts institutions is with the academic quality of programs students choose. One of the strongest incentives for institutions and consortial organizations to operate their own study-abroad programs is to assure the quality of education their students receive overseas. The ultimate nightmare scenario for liberal arts institutions is to export substantial tuition dollars to third-party program providers, only to find that students’ experience abroad contributed little or even detracted from the liberal arts learning outcomes the home institutions seek to instill in their graduates.
The Costs of Study Abroad project will develop a framework for calculating costs in a fashion that will allow comparisons across institutions and program types, including comparisons of programs managed by institutions and programs managed by third-party providers. We will create two products in this project:
- Average Costs Report. Based on the database of costs that will be created from institutional financial responses, we will create a report on the average costs across institutions for the many cost centers associated with the various approaches to study abroad. This will give institutions insight into how their expenses by category compare with others.
- Financial Model. A model – a spreadsheet template – will provide a means for participating institutions to analyze the costs associated with the particular characteristics of their own study abroad program(s). The template will also allow institutions to construct scenarios that explore the impact of reallocations or reductions of study-abroad expenditures.
These two products will be particularly valuable to institutions as results begin to accrue from the Learning from Study Abroad and Extended Contexts for Liberal Arts Learning Projects since they will be able to determine whether resources are being expended in ways that create desired learning outcomes.
We will begin by identifying a set of seven to ten institutions, including liberal arts colleges and larger universities with a liberal arts mission, to participate in the cost study and serve as an advisory group for the full study design and analysis. From this initial base we will expand our reach to recruit up to 25 institutions. Our expectation is that most, if not all, institutions in this study will also participate in the LSA project outlined above; we will draw from institutions nationwide with an interest in developing a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between study abroad and institutional costs.
The CSA project will benefit from initial work that GLCA undertook to develop a study abroad cost model in the final phase of the Global Partners Project. GLCA’s President, Richard Detweiler, initiated a small pilot project to develop and test a financial model for study abroad with three liberal arts colleges: Kalamazoo (GLCA), St. Olaf (ACM), and Centre (ACS). A series of conference calls including the study abroad director and chief financial officer of each college yielded a preliminary model to account for institutional costs of study abroad using three different approaches: a college that manages its own semester-long programs; a college that contracts with universities overseas to provide instruction; and a college that manages its own short (i.e., January term) programs.
A prototype of one of the financial measures will serve as an initial point of reference for the current project, though we do not see this as a final template for the project proposed here. While the final design will reflect the experience and suggestions of institutional participants in this project, we will build a model that accommodates five different types of study-abroad programs in any combination:
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- direct enrollment in an foreign university;
- short-term courses (January or spring term) led by an institution’s own faculty member;
- long-term courses (semester or more) led by an institution’s own faculty member;
- programs of external providers (i.e., the School for International Training); and
- exchange programs with a foreign university.
Study Abroad Learning and Cost Alliance