Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Some States See Decline in Total U.S. Study Abroad Numbers

I’m pleased to introduce our second guest blogger today. Chip Peterson from the Learning Abroad Center at the University of Minnesota has identified an interesting trend in the Open Doors 2008 data. Chip’s post follows:

While glancing through the most recent Open Doors data I noticed a curious phenomenon. One of the tables in the report is entitled, STUDY ABROAD BY U.S. STATE, 2005/06 & 2006/07. According to that table, overall study abroad numbers increased for forty states (plus DC) and declined for ten states. Four of the latter ten are located in the Upper Midwest: Iowa (-0.2%), Minnesota (-1.5%), North Dakota (-16.7%), and Wisconsin (-0.9%)! Within the Upper Midwest only South Dakota experienced an increase (+40.8%).


The remaining six states with declines were much more scattered geographically: Delaware, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Vermont.


The overall national increase, for comparison, was +8.2%.


What do you think is going on here?

2 comments:

  1. @Anonymous ~ Indeed, South Dakota dominated. Very nice to see. Thanks for your comment!

    ReplyDelete