Spending a semester abroad is as much a part of college life as Beer Pong. In the last four years overseas study has gone up more than 45 percent, according to the Institute of International Education. But the destinations are changing. Europe, still the most frequented locale, is out; Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East are in. Attendance at programs is up 77 percent in Thailand and 44 percent in South Africa, for example. What’s driving students off the beaten path? As more American businesses expand into developing economies, undergrads want to gain experience in far-flung places. And in this age of affluence, many high schoolers already have passports inked with European stamps. “Kids will go to France with the French club, England with their parents,” says David Larsen, director of Beaver College’s Center for Education Abroad. “In college they want something more exotic.”
Their adventures can carry a price. A recent analysis by The Detroit News found that during the 1998-99 school year, 1,268 American students studied in 19 countries on State Department warning lists (like Pakistan and Albania) or in countries where the Peace Corps doesn’t go. While studying in Israel during the summer of 1999, Sarah Gordon took a bus from Tiberias to Jerusalem. “The next day on the same bus there was an attempted bombing,” says Gordon, a senior at Sarah Lawrence College. Last year in Costa Rica, three youths abducted and killed Antioch student Emily Howell, 19, and her friend Emily Eagen, 19. “People said it was the safest country down there,” says Howell’s father, Stephen.
Tragedies like that can happen on American soil, of course, but schools are counseling students on how to be more cautious. And adventure seekers are hard to discourage. College junior Elizabeth Pierson, who has already studied in Israel and Australia, is spending the semester in Bali, Indonesia, a country on the State Department’s warning list. Not that it fazes her. “I just don’t see the point of going to Florence and hanging out with other American students,” says Pierson. Italy for a few months–now who’d want to do that?
