Party Abroad
September 29, 2010
COLLEGES, which are always seeking new marketing schemes now that they aggressively pursue a business model, almost universally advertise their study abroad programs. For $50,000, or whatever the going rate for tuition, parents send their college students to a foreign country for a year. Why should a young person party in his native country when he can live hard on an international scale? There are benefits for the culturally-minded student. These rewards might just as easily be obtained by a cheap backpacking trip in Europe. Kristin Kovner in The Wall Street Journal writes:
In 2006 Congress passed a resolution dubbing it the “Year of Study Abroad.” “We want the next generation of adults to be in touch with their national and global citizenship,” says Jessica Townsend Teague, former program manager at the Commission on the Abraham Lincoln Study Abroad Fellowship. But despite good PR, study-abroad programs are often less than rigorous, and underage drinking is rampant. “It’s necessary for the image of study abroad to shift from a ‘party hearty’ experience to a very serious national priority,” Townsend Teague avers. It’s also a matter of safety: “Students go from being unable to drink legally to countries where alcohol is freeflowing,” says Gary Rhodes, director of the Center for Global Education at Loyola Marymount University. “Some students have died while abroad.”
Schools are doing their part to protect students, requiring better orientation and urging them to avoid countries deemed unsafe by the State Department. But Townsend Teague advises students to think before they act: “Take a moment to be very sober about what we can and cannot do to rescue a student overseas.”
— Comments —
Lydia Sherman writes:
People just can’t leave American youth alone. They are forever luring them out of their “comfort zone” (another weasel word used to intimidate people who have stability) away from the authority and protection of their parents. Parents are pressured not to let their children be “tied to their apron strings,” or be too “enmeshed” with their families. There is a constant tug at adult children to reject the values of their parents. Europe sounds glamorous, but why can’t parents take their own children for a visit, instead of sending them into the dubious care of others? I don’t understand this mentality at all. Must it all be done in a herd, where they continue the herd instinct, eating with the herd, studying with the herd, and partying with the herd?
Eric writes:
Amanda Knox was an American student in Italy.
Nora writes:
I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss study abroad programs in general because of the immaturity of some students. At 18 I went to study in Paris as a college junior. I gained speaking fluency in French, which I had worked hard at for six years beforehand, learned a lot about French history, architecture, and literature, got some very valuable firsthand experience living in a different culture with a Parisian family. Since it was the type of full immersion program where the student takes classes alongside other French students, rather than attending special classes for English speaking students, I also got the experience of studying under a very different educational system that in some ways is more rigorous than the American one. Then came the added benefit of my successfully reconnecting with relatives in eastern France during one of the breaks, with whom my family had not been in contact since my grandmother’s death 15 years earlier. We have kept up that relationship ever since. If the purpose of education is to turn an ignorant little barbarian into a cultivated adult, then that year was definitely one of the most productive of all my years in school.
The key to the success of study abroad, or indeed, study in one’s own country, is the quality of the student. If the student in question is an oaf who spends valuable college years in a drunken stupor, then it doesn’t much matter what country he’s in. In fact, it doesn’t much matter whether or not he’s in school. But for a student who has sufficient maturity to take advantage of the opportunities he gets and who is truly interested in the culture of that country, the rewards can be very great indeed. You reap what you sow.
As for Ms. Sherman’s comment about the “herd” mentality of such programs, I avoided that by choosing a study abroad program offered by a university other than the one I was attending, but whose credits my university would accept. I did not want to spend my time in France socializing with other Americans and speaking English. As it was I saw very little of the other participants in that program because we signed up for different classes and we did not share living quarters.
Laura writes:
Study abroad is for the select few, especially for students who are seriously studying languages. It’s now marketed to the masses. For most girls, it offers far too much freedom, and for many students it’s not connected to their studies and offers a chance to slack off, but it has become almost an obligatory college experience.Young adulthood has become so astronomically expensive that it is arguably suppressing the birthrate.
