When we revamped the Bachelor of Management Studies with Honours in 2018, one of the things we introduced was a greater focus on international engagement. As I noted in this post in 2019, the international study tour was an integral (and unique in the New Zealand context) component of the new degree structure. The importance of having more than a passing appreciation of the global context to modern management students (and other students) seems obvious (and taken to an extreme in the case of the original proposal for Minerva University), but is there evidence to support the benefits of such an international approach?
This 2018 article by Silvia De Poli, Loris Vergolini, and Nadir Zanini (all Fondazione Bruno Kessler), published in the journal Applied Economics Letters (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online), provides some suggestive evidence in favour of study abroad. De Poli et al. make use of data from the MOS-4 programme implemented in the Italian province of Trento in 2012, which randomly selected applicants who had just completed their fourth year of high school to complete a four-week intensive English language course in the UK or Ireland. Interestingly, De Poli et al. looked at how the programme affected academic performance, as well as personality traits of the students. Comparing students who were randomly selected with those who weren't, they find that:
...the programme, in the short term, had a positive and significant effect on five of the eight personality traits considered: self-confidence, adaptability, social orientation, willingness to communicate and openness... On the other side, the programme has no effect on other dimensions related to ‘global self-esteem’, defined as the objective assessment of their skills and the acceptance of their quality...
Regarding the improvement of English language skills, we found that participants achieved a better score in the post-programme test as well as enjoying higher school achievement one semester after returning to school... However, with respect to other subjects (e.g. humanities and sciences), participants’ achievement, measured one semester after completion of the programme, did not improve.
However, not all students appeared to have benefited equally. As I have noted in relation to online learning (most recently here), the more engaged and high ability students benefited the most. Specifically, De Poli et al. found that:
...high attainers appeared to have benefitted more from the programme, as they achieved better results in English language in their first semester at school after completion of the programme...
So, as I said earlier, we can take this as suggestive evidence in favour of study abroad. This study had the advantage of randomisation, which is rarely a feature of study abroad programmes, where self-selected students go to (often) self-selected countries to study abroad. That reduces the chance that we can genuinely determine the effect of study abroad due to selection bias. What we really need now is a randomly assigned study abroad programme at the university level, and one that isn't simply focused on the acquisition of host country language skills.
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