Colleges want to discover diverse conduct to Promote Study Abroad to Minority Students

According to a new study, colleges that have trouble recruiting minority students to study abroad have to take into account big differences in how racial and ethnic groups respond to the forces influencing students' decisions to study abroad.Minority students don't need to seek out cross-cultural experiences by traveling to another country because, in most cases, they already regularly interact across cultural differences in their everyday lives,says a paper summarizing the study's findings.

Experts on foreign study programs welcomed the study as likely to help them hone their approaches to recruiting minority students, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.Diana K. Davies, Princeton University's vice provost for international initiatives, said the study shows us that we should not be following a one-size-fits-all approach to promoting study abroad.The study was conducted by Mark H. Salisbury, director of institutional research at Augustana College, and Michael B. Paulsen and Ernest T. Pascarella, both professors of higher education at the University of Iowa. They based their analysis on data of approximately 6,800 students at 53 two- and four-year colleges collected as part of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, a large scale, long-term study of students who entered college as freshmen from 2006 through 2008.Although the racial and ethnic gaps in foreign study participation are not as large as the gap linked to gender, they nonetheless are substantial enough to remain a major concern for administrators of study abroad programs.