Where study abroad has traditionally been viewed as a year-long immersive experience, universities are expanding short-term opportunities for students who don’t have the money or time to go away for longer. These days, more than 60 percent of students who go abroad do either a summer program or a trip during the school year that is less than eight weeks. Around a third spend a semester abroad, and just 3 percent go for an entire school year. Carlos Poblano, a 20-year-old nursing student at Texas A&M International in Laredo, where more than 90 percent of students are Latino, spent three weeks in Ireland last winter taking a leadership course taught by instructors from his home campus. Poblano, who is the oldest of four children and whose family lives just an hour’s drive from Laredo, said his parents were worried about him going so far away, but the short timespan made things more bearable. “For Hispanics, there’s a family orientation,” he said. “A lot of families don’t like to let their kids go out. They don’t want them to go out and get in danger.” Poblano earned a scholarship from Generation Study Abroad to go to Ireland, but not all of his friends knew financial help was available. “They don't know for our school, if you talk to the person in charge of study abroad, she tells you all these ways to get scholarships,” he said.

Wagaye Johannes, the project director of Generation Study Abroad, said students see cost as the biggest barrier, even though some study abroad programs are less expensive than staying at their home universities. The program, which aims to highlight “best practices” for sending more students abroad and increase funding, has found that small scholarships of a few thousand dollars can mean the difference between getting on the plane and staying home for students. Often tuition and other expenses are the same as if they stayed home, but students need help with travel costs.

Culture is another, sometimes tricker, topic. “So often students don’t think study abroad is for them,” Johannes said. “We want to redefine what it means to study abroad.” Sometimes the pushback comes from families who are fearful of their children going someplace unfamiliar. So the institute has put together information for parents in both English and Spanish to allay concerns about their children studying in a foreign country. Johannes’s team also encourages study-abroad offices to reach across campus to diversity offices and work together to assure students from all backgrounds that studying abroad is a possibility.

Alexis Attinoto, a Latina student who graduated recently from Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) in Cleveland, Ohio, completed her senior capstone project in Galway, Ireland. “You definitely stand out [as a person of color],” she said, but “it’s life-changing and broadens the scope of your world.” Attinoto joined her school’s theater and improv groups, and spent weekends in London, Barcelona, and Berlin. Jack Boatman, a Caucasian music-education major from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at CWRU who spent a semester at Trinity College in Dublin, said he wouldn’t have gone abroad if his mom hadn’t suggested it. The school encouraged it, he said, but “first and foremost, it was my mom’s idea.” The academics were “a little more forgettable for me than I would like,” he said, but he relished the chance to play his violin in Irish pubs, and to become more self-sufficient. “A lot of people get too attached to home,” he said. “Most people I know go to school close to home and these people don’t want to take chances.”