From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Former Study Abroad Participant Finds Job In India After Unsuccessful Attempts For Employment In U.S.

What I Did When I Couldn’t Find a Job

It was a bit of a shock, losing all expectations. For years—all my life, really—parents, teachers, and guidance counselors had told me that if I went to a good college and did well, I would be able to find a job after graduation that would, with a little ladder-climbing, keep me comfortable and financially secure. After I graduated in May 2009, in political science, I moved back home to St. Louis to start my career, but there simply were no jobs to be found.

Over several months, I sent out more than 500 résumés for all sorts of jobs all over the country, but I got only two interviews and no offers.

I couldn’t find a job, but neither could anyone I knew. Now, more than a year after graduation, most of my college friends still live at home, and many of those who have moved out are borrowing money from their parents to eat and pay rent. A few have internships, but most of those are unpaid, and few are likely to lead to jobs. Two friends who studied psychology for four years now work off the books at a sandwich shop. Another, who got her master’s in development studies from Cambridge, became a barista at Starbucks.

Some are applying to grad school just to have something to do, but the prospect of racking up thousands more dollars in student debt is crushing. The rest are still looking, sending out résumés, going to career fairs, volunteering for experience, and networking. Some have given up. We are a whole generation graduating into a job market that has no room for us.

So I moved to India.

Two years earlier, I had spent a semester abroad in the Nepali-speaking regions of northeastern India, learning the language and culture through a fantastic study-abroad program at Pitzer College. In India, I met Pema Wangchuk, editor and publisher of Sikkim NOW, the most popular local English-language daily newspaper in the state of Sikkim. A couple months into my job hunt, I sent Pema an e-mail asking if he knew anyone who might be interested in hiring a young, enthusiastic American college graduate. “We’d be quite keen to have you here,” he wrote back.

After lots of e-mails and late-night international phone calls, I got on a plane and went. I had been unemployed for eight months.

My arrangement with NOW is informal. I help out doing a little photography, a little feature writing, and a lot of copy editing. Native-level English proficiency is a rare skill in much of the developing world. I take garbled press releases from local nongovernmental organizations and government departments, and equally garbled correspondent reports from remote districts of the state, and fix the punctuation, syntax, usage, and spelling to turn them into real news stories.

I also write feature pieces for our `Sunday edition, interviewing NGO’s about their projects and local experts about social trends. I’m learning a lot about reporting, writing, and running a small newspaper, not to mention life and politics in northeast India and Asia in general. I suspect I am getting more intimate and comprehensive journalism experience here than I would in almost any internship, temp position, or entry-level job that I could have found back in the States.

In exchange for my work, Pema found me a flat to stay in and arranged for my meals. The cost of living here is so cheap that, with my room and board taken care of, I can live comfortably on around $10 a week. If I were back in the United States, even with the most austere lifestyle, I would be costing my family far more than that by just eating their groceries, running their utilities, and burning their gas.

My Nepali, gone rusty in the two years since studying abroad, is getting better, and I’m picking up a few words of Hindi. Once a week, I volunteer at a small village elementary school, teaching tae kwon do. I’ve made some friends here to hike and go out on weekends with. Every day I see interesting and beautiful things: Tibetan monks playing soccer, stray dogs napping in twisty alleys, snow-covered mountains white (and high) as clouds.

When I Skype and correspond with college friends back in the States, their frustration with the job hunt is palpable, and I wonder: Why don’t more recent graduates move to the developing world to wait out the recession?

Plenty of college grads apply for Fulbrights or the Peace Corps, but those programs are increasingly competitive. For those who don’t make the cut, or who want to just try something different, why not design their own programs, as I have tried to do in Sikkim, finding NGO’s, schools, businesses, or families willing to trade meals and a place to stay for help teaching English, writing grant applications, or editing press releases?

In tough economic times, living in the developing world actually makes a lot of financial sense. In the more prosperous 90s and 80s, plenty of educated and highly skilled Indians moved to America and Europe to find jobs. The cost of living there was higher, but if they made even a little above their expenses, that money would translate into a huge amount back home. What I’m doing is a reversal of that. With opportunities for making ends meet so hard to come by in the States, I have moved to a place where a little savings and family support go a lot farther. Globalization can flow both ways.

Making such a jump isn’t easy. Working out visas and permits is always frustrating, and moving to India or Brazil or Ghana won’t help pay off student loans—but then, neither will futilely sending out résumés every day while racking up credit-card debt.

Some parents may be nervous about letting their kids go abroad on their own, but to them I say: Stop worrying. In many parts of the developing world, Westerners are in no more danger than they would be commuting on the highway every day, and if your children are willing to work and give up a few luxuries, the trip will save you money in the end.

Though I suspect it isn’t impossible to just pick a country, show up, and work something out, I’m not sure I would recommend that. My own “program” was made possible by the contacts I developed studying abroad. So even in a bad economy, a semester abroad—especially in a location more exotic than London or Paris—can be a great investment that opens a lot of doors.

Colleges can help, too. Academics are a worldly bunch, and universities could use their professors’ contacts abroad to find informal volunteer arrangements for many graduates to support them for a year or two while the economy, hopefully, recovers.

It’s raining today, and as I write this, I am sipping sweet tea and watching clouds dance like titans in the valley below. I grew up among the corn and soybean fields of the endlessly flat American Midwest, and the foothills of the Himalayas are an astonishing sight.

I’m not sure how long I’ll stay in India. I’m returning home in November to spend the holidays with my family, and I may test the job market again. Asia is my economic escape hatch. If things don’t work out in the States, I’ll go back to a place where I can live cheaply and make my savings last.

There might not be room for us recent college graduates in the job market at home, but the world is a big place. I bet somewhere out there is an opportunity for each of us. So go.

Andrew Dana Hudson majored in political science at Fordham University. He works as an associate editor at Sikkim NOW, a small newspaper in India. You can follow his blog at www.andrewdanahudson.com.

From Inside Higher Ed: Research Shows Academic Performance Improved, Not Hindered By Study Abroad

Academic Outcomes of Study Abroad

By Elizabeth Redden

In 2000, researchers began an ambitious effort to document the academic outcomes of study abroad across the 35-institution University System of Georgia. Ten years later, they’ve found that students who study abroad have improved academic performance upon returning to their home campus, higher graduation rates, and improved knowledge of cultural practices and context compared to students in control groups. They’ve also found that studying abroad helps, rather than hinders, academic performance of at-risk students.

“The skeptics of study abroad have always made the argument that study abroad is a distraction from the business of getting educated, so you can enter the economy and become a contributing member of society,” said Don Rubin, professor emeritus of speech communication and language education at the University of Georgia and research director for GLOSSARI — the Georgia Learning Outcomes of Students Studying Abroad Research Initiative. “I think if there’s one take-home message from this research as a whole it is that study abroad does not undermine educational outcomes, it doesn’t undermine graduation rate, it doesn’t undermine final semester GPA. It’s not a distraction.

“At worst, it can have relatively little impact on some students’ educational careers. And at best it enhances the progress toward degree. It enhances the quality of learning as reflected in things like GPA.”

The GLOSSARI project is of impressive scope and scale, and not every finding shows a positive impact of study abroad — self-reported knowledge of world geography, for instance, actually decreased across time both for study abroad students and for a control group, and researchers found no significant difference in knowledge of global interdependence between the two sets of students. Rubin and Richard C. Sutton, director of the GLOSSARI project, executive director of international programs at Western Kentucky University, and formerly assistant vice chancellor for international programs at the University System of Georgia, presented these and other findings in a “final report” on the GLOSSARI project at the recent NAFSA: Association of International Educators conference in Kansas City.

Among their findings:

Graduation Rates and GPA: Researchers compared graduation rates and grade point averages for 19,109 study abroad students, from across the state system (which includes community colleges, research universities and institutions in between), with a control group of 17,903 students selected to match the institution, semester of study and class standing of the students who’d studied abroad. “What we’ve tried to do in this project is to be very, very careful about who we compare with study abroad students,” said Rubin. “There are all these arguments that say the reason why graduation rates are higher for study abroad students are they are of higher socioeconomic status, or they may be more industrious, or they may be choosing easier majors.”

Study abroad students, in other words, aren’t representative of all students in the Georgia system. So, rather than merely compare the study abroad students’ graduation rates and other academic outcomes with systemwide rates for first-time, full-time freshmen, who drop out for any number of reasons, the researchers compared study abroad students to a control group of students who had already persisted to the same point in college. They also constructed the control group to closely represent the institutions the study abroad students were coming from (the University of Georgia sends more students abroad than, say, Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, and the control group was created with a goal of reflecting that). “Our goal,” said Rubin, “was to isolate the effect of study abroad and to make our groups as comparable in every respect except that one group studied abroad and the other did not.”

They found that the four-year graduation rate was 49.6 percent for study abroad students, compared to 42.1 percent for students in the control group (and 24 percent for students in the University System of Georgia as a whole). Six-year rates were 88.7 percent for study abroad participants and 83.4 percent for students in the control group (and 49.3 percent systemwide). The effect held across various subgroups of students divided by gender, race and SAT score, but was particularly pronounced for certain groups – most dramatically, four-year graduation rates for African-Americans who’d studied abroad were 31 percent higher than for African-American students in the control group. Four-year graduation rates for other nonwhite students who’d studied abroad were 18 percent higher than for their peers in the control group. Nationally, nonwhite students remain underrepresented in study abroad — according to the latest data, from the Institute of International Education’s Open Doors survey, 81.8 percent of Americans studying abroad in 2007-8 were white.

The GLOSSARI Project found that for students who’d studied abroad, their mean cumulative GPA prior to going overseas was 3.24 and their mean cumulative GPA afterward was 3.30. For the control group over the same period, the mean GPA increased from 3.03 to 3.06. Researchers found a particularly pronounced effect of study abroad on academic performance among students who entered college with the lowest SAT scores. Among students who entered college with a combined SAT score of 800 (on the verbal and math sections), those who studied abroad ended up with a GPA of 3.21 compared to 3.14 for those students who stayed stateside. On the other extreme, for those students who entered college with a perfect SAT score of 1600, study abroad had no effect on their GPA, which on average was 3.25 regardless.

“The conventional wisdom is that students who are at risk should be discouraged from studying abroad altogether,” Rubin said. “But this suggests that study abroad can actually be an intervention to enhance the success for college students who are at-risk. Rather than derailing them, rather than diverting them, it actually focuses them.”

For the rest of the article, go here.

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