Ms Partlo,

As a foreign student received my MA degree and pursuing for my PhD in an American institution, I am also curious about the benefit of these programs. I had chance to observe the depth of knowledge and the quality of services of the people who have benefited from study abroad programs that seeks for a degree. From those observations, I earned a positive perception about the results of such study abroad programs. From your post I understood that first you are interested in American students study abroad, and second the benefit of the program to the attendee's nominal salary. Are these the questions you want to answer, or are you more searching for a broader labor market approach?

Hello Mr. Yilmaz,

Thank you for your reply.  Currently, there is a wealth of information on the labor market benefits of study abroad for countries other than the U.S., but nothing exists for large American populations. For your particular situation, students who study in the U.S., on average make more money and/or have more prestige upon entering the labor market within their home countries.  While we could assume the same is true for American students who study abroad, preliminary findings show this is not the case.   I would like to focus this discussion on salary, specifically because it is of interest to students with the rising cost of tuition in America and the substantial amounts of money needed to study abroad.  Currently, I do not think American employers value the many skills students acquire (many of which are not empirical) from their abroad experiences.  However, as many employers begin to globalize I see this trend changing.  What are your views?  I appreciate your international perspective!

Ms. Partlo,

Even though I have very limited academic knowledge about on US students study abroad, last semester in my Global Issues on Education class we had discussion since University of Kansas one of the major universities students get benefit out of the study abroad program. For that discussion, I had reviewed some statistics about the US students abroad compared to the foreign students coming to the US. The first think I have realized is the difference between the time of stay. About 96% American student studied abroad stayed no more than a semester, about 60% percent of which joins the program only for the summer. In contrast to this, in 2012-2013 academic year only 9% of foreign students coming to the US are for non-degree pursuers. That means the rest will stay in the US at least 2. That gives some intuition about why the foreign students get more benefits in the labor market after their stay in the US since the degree they have gained is a step through their academic and professional excellence. Where I am having hard time to assume same excellence gained by American students going abroad for such a short time period of time in economic perspective. I think American employers currently evaluates the study abroad experiences in this way. This belief of mine could make more sense when we combined the previous statistics with the fact that in 2011-2012 academic year 86% of the American students studied abroad is undergraduate students who possibly have relatively less concern about their academic and professional excellence as opposed to graduate students. Therefore, we have discussed in the class at what level does American students' study abroad experience exceeds a recreational or touristic purposes of visit. I think maybe these facts make American employers undervalue skills the American students gain through study abroad programs, if they do. One last reason to that in my mind is, the competition in the labor market.