Nicholas Kristof’s Modest Proposal: Students Should Earn Credits for Travel

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof sure believes in the power of travel. On the heels of his contest to find a university student to travel with him comes a column suggesting that travel should play a central role in education at American colleges. “Universities should grant a semester’s credit to any incoming freshman who has taken a gap year to travel around the world,” he wrote last week. “In the longer term, universities should move to a three-year academic program, and require all students to live abroad for a fourth year. In that year, each student would ideally live for three months in each of four continents: Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe.”

Great ideas, and we’re not the only ones who think so. Edward Hasbrouck endorses the idea, too, and he points out another piece extolling the virtues of student travel by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll.

Carroll writes:

There’s a saying that people are the same the world over, but that’s only partly true. They are the same on the most basic biological level; they prefer health to sickness, bounty to hunger, peace to war—but on a cultural level, it’s not true at all. Understanding how that’s not true, and how to engage in the necessary communication anyway, is a skill that can’t be learned in a classroom. As the world knits more tightly together, that skill becomes more necessary.

So let them go! Give them beef jerky and water bottles and lovely Canadian flags for their backpacks, and send them into the wide world, and give them a little credit when they come back.

One of Hasbrouck’s readers also points out a university in Maryland that already requires its students to travel abroad. Goucher College bills itself as the first U.S. college to “pair required study abroad with a special travel stipend of $1,200 for every undergraduate.”

©2026 World Hum, All Rights Reserved