Nicholas Kristof’s Modest Proposal: Students Should Earn Credits for Travel
Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 03.28.06 | 1:30 PM ET
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.”
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Michael Yessis is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
Ron Mader 03.30.06 | 8:01 AM ET
Excellent idea!
Reminds me of a pithy saying of a friend of mine: There is no travel without learning and no learning without travel.
Lauren David 04.05.06 | 2:09 AM ET
It’s so great to hear ideas on how to encourage travel among students. Having caught the travel bug from a semester studying abroad in my first year of college, I can’t imagine my life without travel.
My wish is for travel to be more accepted in the U.S. and considered by parents and unversities as important as getting a degree. As graduation approaches, I plan to take off for 6-12 months and find myself justifying my decision to people who haven’t experienced the incredible joys and education of seeing the world.
Let’s make “gap year” a known term in America!
Brad Miller 05.24.06 | 7:06 AM ET
I am happy to see Goucher College bill itself as the first college in America to require study abroad, but two schools have beaten them to that title. Goshen College, in Goshen IN, has required study abroad since the 60’s, and Eastern Mennonite Univeristy, in Harrisonburg, VA has reguired it since 1982.
ramsey 08.09.06 | 9:51 AM ET
if you look on their website, it says Goshen’s study abroad program isn’t REQUIRED, just highly recommended. ` of students do it..
Erin Granat 03.13.08 | 2:00 AM ET
I absolutely agree with the concept of offering credit to students studying abroad, or at least making the credits transition more smoothly! So many people I know had trouble getting the classes they took abroad count once they got back to the U.S., ridiculous! It makes a lot of students wary of studying abroad, afraid it will deter their graduation. That’s where we need a shift in values. Students are encouraged to graduate asap, get a job, done. Let’s definitely make a “gap year” a regular term in America, rather than thinking it’s something unmotivated slackers do post-graduation when they don’t feel like getting a job.