Covid-19 all but halted education abroad. In the summer of 2020,
study-abroad participation fell 99 percent, according to recent Open Doors reporting.
It will be some months before we get the official stats on education abroad’s return, but a picture of recovery is beginning to take shape — one that hasn’t always been easy but whose rough patches have been smoothed, at least a little, by student enthusiasm and educator commitment. Readers wrote in to share their perspectives, and I also sat down with Melissa Torres, president of the Forum on Education Abroad, to talk about what she’s seeing across the sector.
Covid might not continue to be a crisis for study abroad on par with the last couple of years, but it will still affect students’ overseas experiences. As the past week’s discovery of the omicron variant in southern Africa makes clear, the coronavirus threat is not going to disappear anytime soon. “At some point, we will be post-pandemic,” Torres told me, “but I don’t know if we’ll ever be post-Covid. It’s our new reality.”
Globally, rules about travel, vaccines, and quarantines keep changing. Risk isn’t static. Earlier this semester, colleges often opted to allow students to study in a limited number of “safer” destinations; now, western Europe, where many of those students traveled, has some of the worst outbreaks.
Colleges and third-party providers are having to work out a new understanding of how to assess and assume risk. The University of Oregon is “constantly monitoring locations to determine their safety and suitability,” wrote Sam Jones, assistant director of communications for global engagement. At the University of Rochester, Jeff Russin, director of global travel risk management, said not only has risk assessment grown more sophisticated, so too has the response. For example, if cases rise, Rochester may not evacuate students en masse as at start of the pandemic — it can be more dangerous to have students travel than to take precautions and stay in place, he said.
It’s not so easy to flip a switch and resume programming. Restarts have been slow in some places. The state of New York, for instance, has not permitted State University of New York-administered programs abroad to run, although some could get approval for spring semester. Binghamton University had more than 150 applications for spring programs but will likely only send a fraction of that number overseas, said Linda Torricelli, coordinator of education abroad.
Some colleges reported
surging interest. Applications for spring 2022 hit record levels at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, according to Jason A. Kinnear, interim associate dean of study abroad and exchanges, although a few students had to drop out because of slow passport-processing times. More than 375 students are slated to go to 30 countries.
But Torres noted that education abroad staffing was badly decimated by pandemic-related layoffs. One college lost a third of its study-abroad employees. Although hiring has picked up, some workers have left the field for good, leaving fewer advisers to handle student demand.
The pandemic could worsen inequities. Navigating Covid’s additional risks could be more difficult for smaller or one-person offices. Torres worries about the pandemic’s unequal effects in other ways. Progress on diversifying study locations could be eroded if programs in places perceived to be less safe are limited or if students revert to more traditional destinations, she said.
Angela Schaffer is executive director of the Fund for Education Abroad, which gives scholarships to students traditionally underrepresented in study abroad. A number of students started scholarship applications only to drop out because their colleges cancelled programs. And the students FEA serves come from communities heavily affected by Covid so it’s understandable that some of their families may be wary of sending them abroad. The students who completed applications are “some of the most resilient,” Schaffer told me. “But I do worry about the lasting impact.”
The “pandemic pause” led to innovation. With Covid, we confronted what education abroad would look like without air travel. This summer the Forum released a series of guidelines about how study abroad can meet
sustainability goals. After the killing of George Floyd, many colleges and providers began to think about how they could make anti-racism education part of their programming, and the pandemic gave them space to carefully consider new directions.
Of course, Covid led to widespread adoption of
virtual programming. One question will be how online programs will be sustained or integrated when traditional travel is fully back. “There’s a real risk of virtual become a second-class option,” Torres said, “and that would be a travesty.”