Does Content Matter? Analyzing the Change in Global Awareness Between Business- and Nonbusiness-Focused Short-Term Study Abroad Courses

Abstract

Business schools have long sought to increase students’ global awareness. Short-term study abroad (STSA) experiences are becoming increasingly popular ways of generating awareness. While a handful of studies have found evidence of efficacy, none have specifically tested how courses with business content differ from other STSAs. Using a longitudinal data set, we find that all courses, regardless of content, increase students’ general awareness, awareness of global interdependence, and language exposure. However, for students with lower levels of global awareness to start with, business programs appear to be more effective in imparting awareness of global interdependence than nonbusiness programs.

Keywords:

• Longitudinal data
• Global awareness
• Short-term study abroad

Notes

¹ The exception in this literature is Gullekson et al. (2011).

² One shortcoming noted in Gullekson et al. (2011) is their inability to distinguish between the effects of the travel component of the STSA from the pretravel preparation students in their received.

³ We hypothesize the main reasons are financial (the full cost of the course less a $500 deposit was due 3 months before departure) and medical.

⁴ This method has been widely applied in economics. We refer the interested reader to (Angrist & Pischke, 2008).

⁵ Put another way, the average initial level of global awareness for students in a business course would be .

⁶ There is a vast literature that uses quantile regressions in a wide variety of applications. Due to the breadth of this literature, we do not summarize it here. The model presented here is based on the models presented in Buchinsky (1998), Koenker (2005), and Angrist and Pischke (2008).

⁷ Similar to OLS, which fits a linear model to minimize the expected squared error, the QR model estimates:

where is an asymmetric loss function that takes the form:

Koenker (2005) shows that the loss function in the above equation, when minimized, generates conditional quantiles. We refer the interested reader to Koenker for a more detailed exposition of the QR model.

⁸ It is important to note that while the results suggest no additional benefit of participating in a business-related course, students in these courses still benefit from participating in the entire STSA sequence, but not significantly more than students in nonbusiness STSA sequences.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen B. DeLoach

Stephen B. DeLoach, PhD, is a Professor of Economics at Elon University. He earned his BBA from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and his MA and PhD from Michigan State University. His primary research interests include pedagogy, microfinance, and labor economics. Since the late 1990s, he has been active in leading short-term study abroad courses in countries such as Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraine, Slovakia, Croatia, Mexico, Austria, and Germany.

Mark Kurt

Mark Kurt, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Economics and has been at Elon University since 2008. Prior to Elon, Kurt earned his BS in economics from Clemson University and his PhD at The University of Iowa. Kurt has developed and led or co-led short-term study abroad programs to Argentina, New Zealand, Turkey, U.A.E., Greece, Spain, Poland, Italy, and Czech Republic. Kurt’s research interests include labor economics and studying the impacts of short-term study abroad programs. He maintains an active research agenda with publications in journals such as Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad and Journal of Labor Research.

Neal H. Olitsky

Neal H. Olitsky, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His teaching interests include microeconomics, macroeconomics, economic growth, labor economics, and the economics of education. His research focuses on the economics of education, evaluating the effects of individual educational decisions on educational and labor-market outcomes. He also conducts research on economic pedagogy, evaluating the effectiveness of teaching strategies in undergraduate economics courses. He obtained his Master’s and PhD in economics from The University of Iowa.