Why study abroad? It can change your life.
In fact, it almost certainly will. But the problem is that it may not change your life the way you want it too. It may make your world less secure, less predictable. This is an extension of what the people who would oppose "higher order thinking" because it had
the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs.
Study abroad is thus an awful evil plot, because it challenges what a student thinks the world is like. Travel in general challenges what anyone thinks the world is like. This might be a good thing, but it is an uncomfortable thing. And that makes travel sometimes not as wonderful as you might like it to be. But sometimes even in those circumstances it is even better.
To be honest, I never really found it a necessity to study abroad in college. I had travelled extensively with my parents as I was growing up and I had been to the UK, France, Germany, the Middle East, Scandinavia, Soviet Central Asia, and lots of other places, mostly in Europe (and it wouldn't have occurred to me to go anywhere other than Europe, I am sorry to say). Certainly I didn't see the need to go for a semester. Summer programs were available, both in the US and abroad, and I did one of those for archaeological experience, an archaeological practicum in Cyprus. It allowed me to go to Athens, one of the few places in Europe I felt was really important for me to visit. I loved Cyprus, loved traveling with other people my own age, and was comfortable with the process. I had, after all, done the international travel thing with my parents, and I knew how immigration and passports worked, knew to reconfirm my flights, what being in a setting where not everyone spoke English was like, etc..
So the shock of traveling abroad wasn't the benefit. But there were other wonderful parts. I loved the archaeology, and figured at that point it really was what I wanted to do with my life (and it is essentially what I have done ever since). I enjoyed the setting itself, an island which at the time had relatively few tourists, gorgeous beaches, hot dusty fields filled with camel thorn and fragments of pottery, and platters of caperberries, kalamari and grilled halloumi cheese. I developed carpal tunnel syndrome because I spent most of the time on the dig site scraping through very hard soil that felt like it had almost turned to concrete. I went skinny dipping for the first time. I took the picture that would eventually end up as my senior picture in the college yearbook. I still have a poster from a tour agency on the island that I have kept as a souvenir and a cookbook of Cypriot recipes that I use periodically even though I no longer eat lamb or eggplant.
It thus was a really confirming experience. I knew afterwards that I wanted to go to graduate school and do a doctorate and excavate on archaeological sites in my grown-up life. I could travel on my own, make friends as I did so, and communicate without any knowledge of the local language.
One of my colleagues had a semester-long experience in Florence at about the same period I did my trip to Cyprus. She had never traveled abroad before, and this trip led to her (eventually) doing a doctorate abroad, and she travels extensively these days. Both of us advise our students to go abroad as far and as exotic as they think they can manage, for as long as they can. We want them to challenge themselves. If you don't push yourself when you are young, it gets harder to do that later. The trip and, even more, living in a different cultural setting, can either confirm or change what you want to do with your life. Some students fall in love with a country (or, as one of my friends did on her summer program, simply fall in love). Others realize that this is not what they want to do with their lives. And that is an important thing to know.
It is really quite as likely that study abroad (or internships or work experience) will be so outside of a student's comfort zone that the decision afterward will be be "This isn't what I want to do with my life." That has happened -- one student had always wanted to go to Egypt, but the last evening there she complained loudly in a shop that "I can't believe they want to listen to this awful music" when she heard someone reading Quranic texts over the radio. The whole time there had been so focused on ancient material that the modern was just an annoying hassle for her. I never heard from her after we returned, even though she had previously worked in my office. She changed jobs, never contacted me again, and moved on to other classes. In spite of the depressing outcome (I want students to come out of a study abroad trip with me loving the place they visit as much as I do), I think this was a successful outcome. She learned a lot and grew a lot on the trip, even if it wasn't what she had wanted the experience to be.
This is why I like to encourage students to study abroad to be earlier than the junior year of university. The earlier the experience is the more they can build upon it in their academic and post-graduation career.
So how do I feel about high school study abroad programs? International exchange programs where students live in family settings are great, but challenging for younger kids who are dealing with socialization, etc., are really exciting. I knew a few students in college who had done that, and they spoke languages fluently. I was jealous of their experiences, but knew that I would have been horribly lonely if I had done what they did. Like a college program this is the sort that will certainly make an impact, even if the impact is not predictable. I have even more mixed feelings about the high school "If this is Tuesday, this must be Belgium" tours. While yes, it will get you to see London's Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower, and if you are lucky you will get into the Louvre as well, it certainly won't give a heavily chaperoned high school student what a foreign country is like beyond the sights (which will undoubtedly be filled with more tourists than natives).
The one final comment I have is about the difference between summer and semester or year-long programs. I did the summer program as an undergrad, did fieldwork that took me to Egypt for two months at a time, did research in England that set me there for two months at a time, and did my doctorate in Canada (which was study abroad for me). But I never did a semester studying abroad until I went to sub-Saharan Africa to oversee a program. It was a different experience, with pressures I had never felt before. I had the lack of electricity and water, isolation, differing sexual expectations (I decided after a while that being a nun would have been a really useful disguise), health issues (I got malaria, in spite of being very careful about bug spray, mosquito netting, and anti-malarial drugs). I broke down into tears at inopportune I felt like I was in my teens rather than my thirties. It was a humbling and very educational for me. Again, in ways that were not always what I had wanted them to be. In other words, you might not like the experience once you get there, but the process and the results are really good ones to have. I grew up a lot in my first semester abroad, in ways that embarrassed me when I realized I had needed to grow up. It shook my world, and the "me" that reformed after the experience was a different and more mature one. In the final analysis my semester abroad was a really good one for me. I just wasn't completely happy when I was doing it. And that was a useful thing for me to learn.
So... Have you studied abroad in your high school or college career? How did it change you? Would you do things differently? How do you advise your students?