Making the Case with Data

Education abroad offices have no shortage of anecdotal evidence and “life transformation” stories from students about their time studying abroad. However, in a time when budget cuts put programs under pressure to prove their value, education abroad offices must win the support of campus leadership to continue their efforts.

To demonstrate these programs’ strategic value to their institutions, education abroad leaders are increasingly using quantifiable data—but not just any data. Certain data may be more likely to resonate with institutional decision-makers and elected officials. Education abroad leaders share where to find the data, how to interpret and present these data, and how to make connections between data and student outcomes.

Advocating with Quantitative Data

Whether education abroad leaders use data when advocating for their programs to elected officials or campus leadership, the data speak to the quantitative element that anecdotal student stories lack. Having this data can boost institutional recruitment, help with revenue projections, and address gaps in participation among specific student groups.

“When I talk to the vice president or an admissions team or the [chief financial officer] as to why we need to invest in [education abroad] issues, having that [quantitative] data is really important,” says Kimberly Longfellow, assistant director of off-campus programs for St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. Over the past two years, her office has worked on building a strong database that can help the team better understand the students it serves. “It helps us [to] stay consistent and to continue advocating even if there’s turnover within the office,” says Longfellow.

“If I can’t access that data, then it’s hard to make the argument compelling to someone who sits in that position of decision-making.” —Lisa Ho

Access to quantitative data is critical when advocating for federal funding, such as for the Fulbright and Gilman scholarships, says Lisa Ho, director of international and off campus programs for Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, and NAFSA’s advocacy coordinator for Region VI.

“If I’m talking to my congressional representative, they need to understand [that] this is the number of students that we have enrolled looking at education abroad and these are the amount of students [who] are enrolled [who] are eligible for Pell grants,” says Ho. “If I can’t access that data, then it’s hard to make the argument compelling to someone who sits in that position of decision-making.”

What Data Matter

Several factors come into play when determining what kind of data are most useful for education abroad offices when it comes to advocacy efforts. From application data to program participation and retention rates, most available data have useful applications.

For example, education abroad data on retention, graduation, and career outcomes benefit institutional recruitment. “I tell the institution that we need to be front and center, just like athletics, or other cocurricular, extracurricular activities…for prospective students,” says Matt Carotenuto, professor of history and the Hanson associate dean of international and intercultural studies at St. Lawrence University, where he works with Longfellow.

Retention metrics are among the most significant data points for revenue projections. By showing that former study abroad students persist to graduation at higher rates, education abroad offices can link their programs directly to their institution’s fiscal health. “Data become even more crucial for us to say [to institutional leaders], ‘if you’re downsizing an education abroad staff, you directly are impacting your retention rates, which again feed into your fiscal realities for the institution,’” says Orlina Boteva, director of the Office of International Programs at the University of Maine.

“I tell the institution that we need to be front and center, just like athletics, or other cocurricular, extracurricular activities…for prospective students.” —Matt Carotenuto

Participation data and improved year-over-year changes can show the institution’s commitment to study abroad, says Blair Thomson, senior international officer and director of study abroad at the University of Mississippi. “The more people who go abroad, the more [the university] can talk about it.”

“Understanding where you excel with student support and where you have gaps enables you to make changes needed to support [the] best, most impactful experiences,” says Emily O’Callaghan, chief executive officer of miXabroad, an organization that provides a global comparative benchmark for international educational experiences.

Guiding students through the study abroad process often takes more time than campus leaders realize. At the University of Maine, Boteva also uses data related to the amount of time used for advising to advocate for resources to obtain additional staffing for her office.

Data can also reveal the students who aren’t participating in education abroad programs, says Thomson. She often uses financial aid data to recruit students who may believe education abroad is out of their economic reach.

At St. Lawrence, education abroad program application data reveal what majors and departments generate the most—and least—student interest. Carotenuto and Longfellow have found that conservation biology majors study abroad at a higher rate than biology majors. “Sharing the data with the academic department helped them to be aware of different trends…[so they could make] small shifts in their own advising practices,” says Longfellow.

Gathering the Right Data

Knowing what data you need is one thing—finding and accessing the data is another. Many mid- to large-size institutions have an institutional research (IR) department to assist with data collection and analysis. At smaller institutions without an IR department or analyst, the data may be siloed in specific departments, such as admissions or financial aid.

To augment in-house capabilities, some institutions use outside organizations to manage and track education abroad data or to draft reports on the state of study abroad. Ho’s office at Ohio Wesleyan works with Terra Dotta; Via is another option.

In fall 2022, the University of Maine was selected by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities to participate in the Data Literacy Institute, a program of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) to “build and sustain data-informed decision cultures.”

From that training, the University of Maine’s IR department built a dashboard for the education abroad office. “We can slice the data by college, by program, by student demographics, by gender, race, everything else you could look at,” says Boteva. “We’re not putting the work hours behind constantly building these data sets for ourselves.”

“One of the persistent problems in education abroad is that everybody believes global learning is transformative, but we measure transformation differently, or not at all.” —Blair Thomson

It’s common for smaller institutions—such as Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts—to lack the coordinated data found at larger colleges and universities. Kristin Whitfield, director of global education at Gordon, has been in her role for just two years and wants more data to answer basic questions: Can Gordon afford to send more students abroad? What are the top countries where students study abroad? What requirements are often fulfilled abroad? “Our office has no easy way to find that information right now,” says Whitfield. “I would have to look back through spreadsheets organized by semester and compile it myself.”

“One of the persistent problems in education abroad is that everybody believes global learning is transformative, but we measure transformation differently, or not at all,” says Thomson, whose office signed up with miXabroad last year. “The shared benchmark with miXabroad helps us avoid that trap of drowning in spreadsheets that don’t talk to each other,” she says.

Quantifying students’ experiences is the role of postprogram surveys, but institutions often struggle to get students to reply, says Thomson. Her first survey at the University of Mississippi using miXabroad found 97 percent of students felt that they had increased personal growth and self-awareness; 81 percent felt that their experience abroad benefited their career and professional development (the lowest-scoring metric).

Data from comparable institutions can also help make the case for education abroad. St. Lawrence often shares non-identifiable data with a peer network in upstate New York that includes Union College, Hobart College, Skidmore College, Hamilton College, and Colgate University. “[The network] allows our administration to see something that’s happening with us and our applicant pool is very similar [to] or different from our peer institutions,” says Longfellow.

To gauge their programs against those at peer institutions, many education abroad offices use the Institute of International Education’s (IIE’s) Open Doors report. Recently, Ho was asked by her provost where the university ranked among peers according to Open Doors. “I was able to reframe that using our data to say if we were ranked based on percentage [of enrollment], we would be in the top 30 institutions sending abroad,” she says.

Outcomes and Achievements

Connecting data to institutional goals and outcomes can make a powerful case to campus leadership for the value of education abroad. Over the past two years, Longfellow’s office has worked with IR to bolster the university’s goals of attracting and retaining students. Anecdotally, Longfellow knew students who had studied abroad felt connected upon returning to campus. The data proved it.

“Overall, the return rate to campus [to St. Lawrence] for off-campus study students was consistently higher than the return rate for the university at large,” says Longfellow. “We were able to situate off-campus study within the institution’s strategic goals.”

The IR team at St. Lawrence also had data on student interest levels upon matriculation that dovetailed with advocacy for education abroad. “Students who were generally interested in off-campus study, regardless of whether they went, were still retained at a statistically higher rate,” says Carotenuto. “When we go to the finance department and CFO…it helps to see this less as just a cost and more as an investment in a high-impact academic program.…We wouldn’t have been able to do that study on our own.” 

“Using data to create the model allowed the administration to have confidence the change would not negatively impact our bottom line.” —Kristin Whitfield

Gordon College used financial aid data to advocate for a change to the way global program charges were allocated, helping students make informed choices. “We moved away from reassessing each student’s aid to a model based on the actual cost of the program. This allows students to know up front what they will pay for the program of their choice and simplifies the process,” says Whitfield. “Using data to create the model allowed the administration to have confidence the change would not negatively impact our bottom line.”

Accessing Better Data

Wherever an education abroad office is on its data journey, it can look for both big and small ways to improve. 

An important place to start is with proper coding of study abroad students in the student database. This step is essential to data analysis across the institution, says Boteva. She recently showed that, at the University of Maine, there wasn’t a significant drop, as feared, in the retention of second-year engineering students; in fact, the initial retention data analysis had simply failed to capture the students enrolled in study abroad programs.

Any quantitative data analysis should start with surveying your students, recommends O’Callaghan: “Understanding their motivations, experiences, and outcomes is the foundation of any meaningful advocacy strategy.”

For those looking for a larger overhaul, consider working with outside organizations such as Terra Dotta or Via, says Ho. “Have a meeting with the financial decision-makers and see what you can invest in, because it’s a good investment to have something like that if you could justify it.”

While campus leadership often focuses on cost and employability outcomes, student surveys show that experience, connections, and cultural understanding are the main drivers for participation, says O’Callaghan.

Ultimately, successful advocacy combines quantitative metrics with qualitative motivations and the “life transformation” stories to frame education abroad as a high-impact academic investment.  •