The Fingers Matter by Eric

The Fingers Matter by Eric - March 2016 Scholarship Essay

College students shouldn’t be required to study abroad anymore than minor league baseball coaches should be required to spend a summer learning cricket. I mean sure, knowing the origin of your sport could help you get in touch with it’s core fundamentals and lead to an increased respect for the game, but it won’t win championships. In the same way, forcing college students to study abroad won’t significantly help them at their future job unless their desired field is something like international politics or Japanese. Now, odds are the reward for this essay contest is going to go towards someone arguing in the affirmative, that college students should be required to study abroad, but I am still going to make a case in an effort to dissuade anyone from marching into Congress to lobby for such a ridiculous requirement. That being said, I have two contentions: (1) Not all majors have anything to do with matters outside of the United States, and (2) Globalization has caused cultural osmosis, which has diminished the overall quality of studying abroad.

All I would really need to do to make my first point clear is list majors that wouldn’t benefit from such a policy, so I will. Construction Management, Human resources, programming, information systems, agriculture, criminal justice, nursing, exercise science, chiropracting, and accounting are all examples of areas of study that would not be benefitted by a study abroad. Don’t be confused, I am not condemning the notion that a study abroad would be personally beneficial to those who went on such an excursion (at least not until paragraph four), but what I am saying is that forcing students in these fields to spend even a moment outside of their respective field would do little to improve their workforce viability.
Going back to the counterpoint that I just made, a study abroad for college students would probably be of some benefit, but I doubt that the benefit would be of any substantial value. It’s the same way that a dancer has to learn algebra in High School or a football player has to take some kind of musical elective. Neither of these types of students usually end up needing the skills they are required to learn, but it helps them become well-rounded. Is this good? Depends on who you ask. Those who study Millennials would say that making us too dynamic has caused our self efficacy to grow to an almost unmanageable level.

Let’s move on to how a study abroad stands to benefit a person. Based on what I understand, a study abroad is an opportunity for cultural and economical immersion with an increased emphasis on subject matter that is highly relevant in the student's area of study. In more simple terms: it helps you get to know the world and teaches you cool stuff about the things you are studying. Requiring every student to travel away to a far country in the off chance that they will find some relevance in their respective field is dangerously presumptuous. It just isn’t realistic for every college student.
Lastly, anyone who has ever traveled farther than 1000 miles away from where they grew up knows that you don’t have to go too far from home to find a different cultural experience. Take someone from Boise and shove them into the middle of downtown San Antonio on the first week in May and you will have yourself quite the cultural immersion. The “cultural diversity” aspect of studying abroad can reasonably be found within the confines of the Union, so requiring students to have to go through the visa or passport process would be a major waste of time and resources.

On the flip side, Globalization has made the world extremely less diverse. The orientation of the fingers may be slightly different between New York and England, but either way you are getting flipped off. Traveling abroad will do little to give someone the cultural experience that such a program stands to offer. People are pretty similar no matter where they choose to make their nest, you can find unique architecture in your own neighborhood, and there is plenty of technological advancement going on right here in the States, so it doesn’t make sense to require students to venture off on some quest across the lake to find what already surrounds them.

In conclusion, I want to re-emphasize that I think studying abroad is great. Many of my friends have come home better acquainted with the world around them and they tend to be a much more useful member of society as a whole. However, requiring all college students would prove to be an ineffective policy because many students just don’t need the experience to be good at what they enjoy, and in this day and age of Globalization they may have a hard time having a truly culturally diverse experience.