17.1 Introduction

Study abroad programs provide potentially life-changing experiences for undergraduate students. In addition to offering opportunities to enhance intercultural competence, students can build soft skills, apply discipline-specific content in real world settings, and improve their job prospects through study abroad opportunities. Students can also earn credit toward the completion of their degree while visiting countries and destinations that they may never experience otherwise. Recognizing the importance of global citizenship and intercultural competence, universities across the U.S. have increasingly encouraged students to study abroad. For example, the Institute of International Education’s Generation Study Abroad Initiative has attracted over 800 institutional partners committed to increasing study abroad opportunities since the inception of the program in 2014 (Institute of International Education 2019a).

Short-term study abroad programs, defined as experiences that last less than 8 weeks or occur during summer terms, have become more popular recently as universities look to expand study abroad options. While the number of U.S. students studying abroad has grown in recent years, almost 65% of all students studying abroad participated in short-term programs in the 2017/2018 academic year compared to approximately 55% of students studying abroad in 2008/2009 (Institute of International Education 2010, 2015, 2019b).

Short-term study abroad programs may be more appealing to students for financial reasons since shorter trips are typically more affordable. The short-term programs also allow students to travel abroad while maintaining their on-campus schedule, continuing to participate in university activities including athletics and clubs, and keeping employment options open as many students work throughout their college careers. Compared to a semester or yearlong study abroad program, short-term study abroad programs are typically less intimidating for students who have not previously traveled abroad. Short-term study abroad programs also often have the additional benefit of being directed by faculty members on campus. Faculty members can design experiences to help students get the most out of a short-term program by creating a class experience that encourages intercultural learning and connecting discipline-specific content to the trip. Students and their parents may also feel more comfortable with travel abroad when students are accompanied by a faculty member with travel experience who can provide a safe and structured travel opportunity for students.

Despite the general recognition of the value of study abroad and the commitment on behalf of many universities to enhancing study abroad participation, numerous challenges may prevent further development of study abroad opportunities. While 1.9% of all students reported participation in study abroad during the 2017/2018 academic year, this is a relatively modest increase from the 2013/2014 academic year when 1.6% of students participated (Institute of International Education 2015, 2019b). Fischer (2019) cites a lack of faculty incentive and absence of recognition of international program development as part of promotion considerations as contributing factors in the relatively modest study abroad numbers. While short-term faculty-led programs provide potential to further expand access to study abroad, the programs require a serious time commitment on behalf of the faculty and staff involved, as well as a financial commitment from administration to fund the startup. Faculty must select a location and prepare for a trip far in advance, design a course, recruit students, complete necessary trip documentation and plans, deliver a course, and travel with students. Additionally, these trips typically occur when faculty have a break from teaching and displace time normally utilized to catch up on other work.

While the emphasis on short-term programs has increased in recent years, there are still relatively few academic resources designed to assist faculty in the development of a faculty-led study abroad program in specific fields. Sachau et al. (2010) and Keese and O’Brien (2011) offer advice for the design and delivery of short-term study abroad programs in general and note the lack of articles specifically intended to assist faculty with developing and managing short-term study abroad programs. While recent research has provided additional advice for faculty (Bain and Yaklin 2019; Pittenger et al. 2019), Strow (2016) highlights a lack of publications that provide guidance on the development of study abroad courses in the field of economics in particular and provides faculty with advice on developing a course involving a trip to Costa Rica. Faculty members looking to offer faculty-led short-term study abroad options for their students could benefit from better guidance on effectively designing and offering these programs. The challenges associated with designing and delivering study abroad courses may be a contributing factor in the relatively limited growth of study abroad participation.

Given the expansion of short-term study abroad programs, research has also focused on the extent to which short-term study abroad programs contribute to student acquisition of intercultural competence. A number of articles related to short-term study abroad programs have noted that research regarding their efficacy is continuing to develop and there is some debate in the literature regarding their overall contribution to intercultural learning (Gaia 2015; Niehaus et al. 2018; Mule et al. 2018). Numerous studies indicate that short-term study abroad programs can improve intercultural competence (Chieffo and Griffiths 2004; Gaia 2015; Walters et al. 2017). Other studies suggest that short-term programs may not provide students with an opportunity to develop intercultural competence in comparison to longer-term trips (Medina-López-Portillo 2004), do not necessarily increase self-identification as global citizens (Mule et al. 2018) and may provide only a trivial experience for students if not designed correctly to foster intercultural competence (Di Gregorio 2015).

This chapter provides guidance for faculty members seeking to effectively design short-term faculty-led study abroad programs in economics or finance that both engage students in discipline-specific content and assist students in developing intercultural competence. We draw on our experience with the design and delivery of a short-term faculty-led program in Madrid, Spain to offer advice on the initial preparation and selection of a location, curriculum design, marketing and course registration, management of the student experience during the trip, and follow-up activities and assessment after returning from the trip. Additionally, aspects of the program that were designed to specifically promote contributions toward student development of intercultural competence are highlighted throughout the paper. We intentionally attempted to engage in cultural mentoring behaviors outlined in Niehaus et al. (2018). Cultural mentoring actions include expectation setting, explaining host culture, exploring self in culture, and facilitating connections.

17.2 Selection of Location and Initial Preparations

Faculty who want to offer a short-term faculty-led study abroad program for students will first have to select a destination for the trip. There are many locations around the world that could provide students with great opportunities to travel and learn. However, it makes sense to consider the goals of the course, cost, student interest, and the faculty member’s ability to facilitate the learning experience in the selection of location. After considering the needs of our students, we selected Madrid, Spain for a variety of reasons. Spain offered an opportunity for students to experience a new culture in a location that students and their parents viewed as an attractive and safe location. There is no shortage of amazing art, architecture, music, food, and literature to explore in the city. Both the historical and recent economic and political landscape of Spain is of great interest to students of economics and finance. Madrid also provides a relatively affordable location for students departing from the East Coast of the U.S. Airfare is generally reasonable, modestly priced food is available in the city, affordable public transportation is available, and many of the major attractions in the city are easily accessible to the public. Finally, students can visit Spain with just a U.S. passport. It is no surprise that Spain is the third most popular location for U.S. study abroad programs (Institute of International Education 2019b).

Another decision that faculty will need to determine early in the process is whether to partner with a host institution or other organization in the destination location to assist with the study abroad experience. Alternatively, faculty may prefer to design, plan, and lead the trip on their own. We decided to partner with Nebrija University in Madrid due to the high-quality experience that the university could provide for our students and the commitment to excellence that our contacts at the university displayed throughout the planning process. Our partners in the International Programs Office at Nebrija University secured hotel accommodations at a great price in a central location in Madrid with all meals included. The university offered a variety of class sessions on topics including Spanish culture, Spanish politics, income inequality, the Spanish financial sector, and the business environment in Spain. They were able to schedule workshops for our students to work with Spanish students and international students studying in Spain on the Nebrija University campus. Nebrija University also scheduled visits to cultural, business, and government sites based on the needs of our students. University staff accompanied students on several trips to assist with language translation when necessary. We selected field trips including the Prado Museum, the Official Institute of Credit, and the National Commission of Markets and Competencies. It is important to discuss the cost of the partnership in detail, but the university was able to provide very reasonable pricing for the student experience. The International Programs Office staff and faculty helped to provide a great experience for our students and offered several opportunities that would be challenging or difficult to recreate on our own. If faculty decide not to partner with a local university or organization, we strongly suggest researching housing, food, field trips, opportunities to interact with local students, and transportation in detail well in advance of the trip.

In order to prepare for the trip, we suggest a site visit to the destination approximately one year prior to the student trip if feasible. While it is possible to travel with students to a location for the first time, we found that a brief site visit provided us with an opportunity to identify a number of great opportunities for students and better plan the overall experience. Fortunately, Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) provided support for us to stop in Madrid for two nights as part of another university-sponsored trip. This afforded us with an opportunity to meet with the host university, visit the campus, and examine the hotel. It was much easier to discuss trip details in person with our host university and plan an itinerary on location even though we stayed in the city for less than two full days. We were also able to explore field trip opportunities for students and become familiar with key locations so that we could assist students in navigating the city upon arrival. We would suggest becoming familiar with the location of the nearest U.S. embassy and a local hospital just in case of an emergency.

17.3 Course Curriculum Design and Teaching Before the Trip

One of the major underlying aspects of a faculty-led program is the actual course that students will register to take as part of their curricular requirements. Many colleges and universities offer faculty some flexibility when trying out new courses. At our institution, we can teach a course one time as a ‘Special Topics’ course. It can only be offered only once without going through the proper curriculum approval process, which can typically take 3–5 months. Once the course is approved, it can be published in the next catalog publication, so that students can view the course offering and then register to take the course. It is important to keep your institution’s catalog publication date in mind, so that you can plan accordingly for this lengthy process. In addition, the course needs to be in the catalog the semester before you plan to offer the faculty-led program, as that is when student registration occurs.

The ability to teach a course one time as a special topics course alleviates the many hurdles described above. This also allows you to test which course aspects work well, before submitting your syllabus and course for approval. Syllabus design is critically important as it outlines the foundation and expectations of the course and faculty-led program. The syllabus is the contract between you and your students. Immediately following our first trip to Madrid with 15 students, we realized that the design of our syllabus was missing some incentives and disincentives. For example, on the last day of structured activities, one of our students decided to sleep-in and not participate, partially because it would not have a major impact on their grade. As a result, we revised our syllabus to place more weight on activities and participation. We also did not have ample disincentives for bad behavior, so we revised our syllabus to allow the instructor to remove a student and not allow them to participate in the structured activities. Since we already placed greater weights on those specific aspects, not participating will now have a detrimental impact on their grade. Our general rule was to have any incentive or disincentive cost a student a letter grade (10%). We felt that the cost of a letter grade was an easy concept for students to realize and incentivize them to change their behavior.

It is important to consider designing faculty-led programs that fit into students’ academic programs when creating your course. The minimum number of students to run a course at our institution is ten. Getting students to register for your faculty-led program is important and your course must be practical and useful in terms of getting students closer to graduation, in addition to being appealing, intellectually challenging, and affordable. To add value for students, we created two separate courses that are nearly identical, but with different prefixes. Both courses were submitted through the curriculum approval process. We created two courses:

  • ECO 455: Experiential International Economics

  • FIN 455: Experiential International Finance

These courses allow students to register for either an upper-level economics or upper-level finance course, satisfying the degree requirements for more students in our school of business, rather than just our department’s majors. Of course, any student in our university could always register for the course, but it would use up one of their free electives. As you could imagine, our faculty-led program to Madrid might look more appealing to business administration students trying to satisfy a 300–400 level finance elective requirement. We attempted to design our course objectives to reflect both the goals of developing intercultural competence and discipline-specific knowledge. Niehaus et al. (2019) provide an assessment of course objectives in short-term study abroad courses, finding that faculty may tend to emphasize discipline-specific content over intercultural competence. Even when course outcomes focus on intercultural competence, many faculty instructors seem to focus on knowledge over skills and attitudes. We recommend reviewing the article when designing course outcomes.

Through trial and error, we have rearranged how we teach this course. The highlight of our course for students is the trip to Madrid occurring over spring break. However, prior to the trip, we meet with students on Wednesday from 5:00 to 6:00 pm.Footnote 1 We designed these classes to meet some of our course objectives, discuss both discipline-specific concepts and intercultural concepts, and take care of administrative issues. Two half-hour time slots are dedicated for our study abroad and student life offices to discuss the rules and regulations related to international travel expectations of students. In our other class meetings, we review the five academic components of the class, which are:

  • Component 1—Why are you here?

    • Please write an essay explaining why you are going on this trip. What are you looking forward to most? What concerns (if any) do you have? What finance concepts are you interested in exploring during this class/trip? What plans (if any) do you have to work in a field related to finance? (2–3 pages)

  • Component 2—Spanish culture and analysis of business practices in Spain

    • Identify three important cultural aspects from Spain that you find interesting. These can be anything from food traditions, family traditions, religion, historical, etc. Discuss the similarities/differences between culture in the U.S. Additionally, please find scholarly articles that identify a business trend in Spain using the Shapiro Library Resources. Reflect on your thoughts on the articles, why the trend is important, and how businesses can capitalize on the trend going forward. How are the trends similar and/or different to trends in other European countries and the U.S.? (3 pages)

  • Component 3—Journal

    • Keep track of your experiences in Madrid in a journal. You will want to document your experiences with faculty and students on campus, trips to businesses, and other experiences. You will want to describe your thoughts/feelings regarding these experiences. At a minimum, you are required to write a 1∕2 page summary of each day of classes at Nebrija and each tour/visit. Feel free to include additional travel or research that you would like to consider for the future based on your experiences in Madrid. Additionally, find and document exchange rates for US Currency at five different banks while in Madrid on 3 separate days. (minimum 5 Pages)

  • Component 4—Reflection

    • Complete a reflection paper regarding your experience in Madrid. What did you learn? What did you find surprising? Would you do anything differently? What advice would you provide for other students regarding travel abroad? How will you apply what you learned going forward? You have flexibility with this assignment to discuss your experience. As an alternative, you can create a 5-min video documenting your experience that can be shared with other members of the SNHU community. (minimum 3 pages)

The pedagogy of teaching languages invokes students to participate in activities that spark conversation, laughter, and engagement. These Spanish classes encouraged our students to talk to each other, learn the basics of the Spanish language, and build friendships before departing for the trip. They also helped students learn more about the culture of Spain and feel more comfortable about knowing what to expect upon arrival. Increased familiarity of the native language created confidence and excitement among our students, a component that had been missing from our earlier design. Again, this design alteration was a major improvement for our course.

Cultural diversity and education are important issues on our campus and emphasized by university administrators. Given the importance of intercultural competence, we devoted time in our classes to discuss student expectations for the Madrid trip and Spanish culture. We also encouraged students to read Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past (Tremlett 2008) before the trip to provide students with a better understanding of Spain’s recent history. This faculty-led program could represent a pathway to achieving the goal of increasing cultural awareness. To assess whether that happens, we utilize a CQ (Cultural Intelligence) assessment tool.Footnote 2 The tool is administered through a survey of questions targeting student awareness, attitude, or beliefs before and after the experience. The post-test measures the effectiveness of our design and experiences. To make sure students took this seriously, we allocated 5% of their final grade to completing the pretest and post-test.

17.4 Marketing for Course Registration

Successful faculty-led programs offer potentially life-changing opportunities that open doors previously unknown for students who participate in the course. This cannot occur if the course is low-enrolled and does not run. Our institution has a minimum of ten students to register for the course, and there is an additional $2500 ‘lab’ fee attached to registering for this course. We recommend 12–15 students and 2 faculty members.Footnote 3

At our university, there are trips that do not run because of low enrollment. It is critically important that the marketing of your faculty-led program is a priority before and during the registration period. Imagine all the planning and effort that you have invested into creating this faculty-led program, and then find out that the program will not run because not enough students register for the course.

The faculty-led program you create must offer value to the students and there are many different opportunities to add value in the design phase, as discussed earlier. Prior to registration is when you can highlight all of the great things that your study abroad course offers. The structure of the fall term does not easily lend itself to many extended studying abroad opportunities. Thanksgiving break is the exception, but the week is often dedicated primarily for family gatherings and relatively close to the end of the fall semester. Consequently, most of the faculty-led programs at our institution occur over spring break or after final exams in May. This means the fall registration period is when most students will be registering for their study abroad course.

The study abroad and marketing office typically provide stand up posters or fliers that highlight the different options available to students. While this does provide exposure, it does not necessarily highlight or recruit specifically for your faculty-led program. One way to increase registrations is to visit other classes and give a brief 5-min explanation of your faculty-led program. Another way, that we have found to be more successful, is by e-mailing specific groups of students organized by their major. To assist in sparking interest and urgency, we let them know there are a limited number of spots available and students are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

This past year our school of business organized an information session for all students interested in attending a faculty-led program. At this information session, five different faculty-led programs were presented to interested students. We do not feel this was too effective at increasing our program registrations and it also was not well attended. Alternatively, we suggest holding 1–2 information sessions exclusively for your students. Offering pizza and soda at the meeting is a good idea. Finally, speaking with students on an individual basis can help ease some of that early anxiety and fears about embarking on international travel.

A variety of faculty-led programs to different locations potentially provides a nice benefit to a university through increased overall enrollments. When parents and prospective students come to campus to learn about the university and academic programs, we have found that parents absolutely love faculty-led programs. Parents are generally concerned about student safety when considering an individualized study abroad experience for a semester in a foreign country. When they hear about faculty members are leading a group of students on a structured, academically inspired, and supervised short-burst trip abroad during spring break, parents are generally more comfortable and excited about the opportunity.

17.5 Madrid Trip and Advice for Travel

As with most things, prudent planning results in a greater likelihood of success. Most of the planning for your faculty-led program draws from the structure created in your course syllabus. We include a detailed itinerary for each day starting with our departure from campus and ending on our return to campus.

The detailed itinerary is important for a variety of reasons. The itinerary outlines your expectations of the students, provides them guidance on where and when they need to be at certain places, and provides the basic organizational framework for your entire trip. Obviously, schedules and events are always subject to change, but setting expectations and following through on them creates a reliable atmosphere, which reduces student anxiety. Students need to know what is expected of them and the consequences for not meeting those expectations. There can be many pitfalls associated in traveling with students internationally. Some are foreseeable while others are not. We provide our recommendations in this section based upon our experience.

Initially, our university had not planned on providing transportation to the airport from our campus and instead asked everyone to meet up at the airport. This had the potential for many unnecessary complications and starting off the trip on a bad note. You can imagine students getting lost, stuck in traffic, going to the wrong terminal, and some ultimately missing the flight and/or trip entirely. We asked and received support from our school of business to organize transportation departing from our parking lot.Footnote 4 The same transportation was also waiting to pick us up when we returned.

To avoid any complications with students taking other courses and potential midterm exams, we designed the departure time to be Friday night, arriving in Madrid on Saturday. We then departed from Madrid and arrived back in Boston the following Saturday. This schedule allows the students 11∕2 days to adjust to Spain and 11∕2 days to adjust to being back in the U.S., before classes start on Monday. There is an opportunity to reduce transportation costs if all faculty-led programs coordinated their departure and arrival times. All students and faculty participating could potentially take a bigger bus to and from the airport. At this time, some programs do not have organized transportation, some leave during the middle of the week (before spring break begins), and some come back after spring break. Students always ask how much money they should bring on the trip with them. When we designed the faculty-led program, we included their airfare, transportation, hotel, all meals, subway pass, and excursions expenses into the extra $2500 charge for the course. That means students could feasibly attend this trip with no additional expenses. Our general suggestion for students was to budget approximately $200 in additional spending, depending upon how many souvenirs they would like to buy or if they want to eat out at other places outside the hotel cafeteria.

Our original itinerary set aside 1 h for lunch. We realized that this was not feasible, and it needed to be closer to 2 h. We found ourselves rushing to hastily go back and forth from the local host university or meet our contacts on time at a site visit. The cafeteria (adjacent to the hotel in Madrid) provided all the meals that were included (breakfast, lunch, and dinner). The food was not particularly great, but it did provide the necessary nutrition. Most students ended up going out to one of Madrid’s amazing restaurants for dinner, while towards the end of the trip we found some students who were a little strapped for cash joining us for dinner at the hotel cafeteria. Again, while the food was not spectacular, it did offer students a free option and a check-in time where they knew they could talk to us about anything.

The check-in times are important for regrouping and catching up with everyone regarding their experience. Prior to leaving on the trip, students were paired up with roommates for the hotel, not only because we needed to have two students in each room, but also for safety when going out at night. The expectation was that our students would not be going out alone. Every morning, we would have a check-in before venturing out to a site visit or to the local host university. Most students were prompt at the beginning of the trip, but as the week progressed, waking up on time became an issue. Roommates typically looked out for each other. However, initially we were knocking on doors trying to get everyone to wake up. In retrospect, this is not something we would advise faculty to do. Students need to be held accountable and act responsible. Consequently, we revised the grade weights for participating in activities (incentives/disincentives in our syllabus) to enforce our expectations. Their actions now more directly influence their letter grade, and in the case that the impact on their grade is not severe enough, we would remind the student that we have the authority to send them back to the US early and at their own expense, if they did not change their behavior.

Additionally, faculty should be prepared to encourage students to engage with meaningful interactions with individuals in the host country throughout the trip. Students may tend to stick together and avoid interactions due to language barriers and/or a fear of interacting with people in a different country. Scheduling devoted time for students to interact with students in the host country is one option to ensure students engage with members of the community during the trip.

A few final recommendations regarding the traveling portion are to always remind the faculty to do a headcount. It is the quickest way to make sure you have everyone all in one place at the same time. Relying on the students to know if their classmates are all present is not reliable. It is a good idea to start a group text message for easy communication. We suggest that you enter names into your phone so that you know who is writing the text messages. Cellular communication is only effective if your students have their phones turned on while abroad, which is why we require students to set up a plan with their provider prior to departure.

17.6 Post-Trip and Assessment

Students and faculty members will likely be exhausted upon return from the trip. Depending on the timing of the study abroad experience, students and faculty may need to immediately return to classes shortly after returning from the trip. While there may be more flexibility during the summer, it is important to consider other student and faculty obligations after the conclusion of the travel. Our trip occurs during the week of spring break, which leaves students with just 6 or 7 weeks of class remaining. Regardless of the timing of your trip, it is likely advisable to provide a break for students to recover, readjust, and process the trip before engaging additional work or conversation. However, we have found that students are typically excited about the travel and happy to meet to discuss the experience. You could consider scheduling an additional meeting time for all students or potentially meet with students individually or in small groups once everyone has a chance to recover.

In our experience, the reflection assignment is an extremely important component of the course. This assignment provides students with an important opportunity to explore their personal experience in the host country culture and connect experiences in the host country to previous experiences in the U.S. We encourage students to review their journal assignment, in which they have documented their trip in detail throughout their time in the host country, while completing the reflection assignment as it can be easy to overlook experiences and feelings after the fact. Students are offered a substantial amount of time (up to 1 month) to complete the assignment given the time that it may take to fully appreciate the experience and competing responsibilities that students have when returning to the U.S. We also offer the opportunity for students to submit a brief video (YouTube clip) as their reflection assessment, which we utilize to show future students the class and trip that they may be able to experience.

Students are also asked to complete the follow-up Cultural Intelligence assessment, which is designed to measure changes in the effectiveness of student capabilities in diverse situations after traveling abroad. It may be important to remind students to submit these assignments as some students may have many other obligations. This is an important assessment requirement at our institution, which is why we offer 5% of the course grade to this assessment.

It is important to provide quality feedback on the final reflection, either in writing or through conversation. Some students may prefer discussing the experience directly with faculty members while others will feel more comfortable providing more detail in writing (some reflections were 20+ pages). Students often make important connections in the reflections based on our experience. Faculty will also need to determine how to best follow up with students after the conclusion of the class. Since we work at a university with relatively small classes, we were able to chat with almost all of the students who attended our trip individually after the conclusion of the study abroad program. Many students will likely be interested in discussing specific aspects of the experience, which provides a great opportunity for faculty to help facilitate connections between student experiences at home and abroad. Additionally, it is a good idea to follow up with students after the trip to suggest additional opportunities to build intercultural competence. Rowan-Kenyon and Niehaus (2011) find that short-term study abroad programs may encourage students to take advantage of longer-term study abroad options and additional opportunities to build on their travel experience. One of our students, who had been initially worried about international travel in general, decided to study abroad for a full semester after our first short-term program. This is a sure testament to the effect that faculty-led programs can change the direction of a student’s life.

17.7 Conclusion

Universities have attempted to expand access to study abroad programs and increasing numbers of students are traveling abroad on an annual basis, but there is still a great deal of work to be done to encourage more students to engage in study abroad opportunities. Study abroad has the potential to deliver numerous benefits including helping students to develop intercultural competence, enhance valuable skills that can assist in the job market, and develop a lifelong love of travel. While short-term faculty-led study abroad programs require a great deal of effort on behalf of faculty members and serious attention must be paid to the development of intercultural competence in the design of programs, the opportunities for students are absolutely worth the effort in our opinion. Additionally, while some faculty may be intimidated by the responsibility for student safety in another country, careful planning and collaboration with university partners can alleviate many potential problems.

We hope that this chapter provides assistance and encouragement for faculty members looking to design and offer short-term faculty-led study abroad programs. In our experience, the short-term program provides many students who could not travel as part of their degree program with some of the benefits of studying abroad in a longer-term program without the cost or time commitment and also encourages students to engage in travel opportunities after the completion of the program. In addition to being a great experience for students in our class, we also learned a great deal through the experience and continue to discuss the study abroad trips with students in other classes. We also hope that faculty members continue to share their experience with faculty-led programs to provide guidance for others. Finally, we encourage additional research on the effectiveness of short-term faculty-led trips and further exploration of options aimed at increasing opportunities in study abroad programs, particularly for students of color, lower-income students, and first-generation students who are currently underrepresented in study abroad programs.