Each year, around a quarter of Penn’s junior class chooses to depart Philadelphia — and the United States entirely — to participate in one of the University’s study abroad programs.
Penn offers 95 approved study abroad programs, and various other programs for which students may petition for approval from Penn Abroad. The Daily Pennsylvanian examined undergraduate Penn students’ study abroad trends to understand how many students participate, which destinations are the most common, and which students choose to go abroad.
The DP’s analysis is based on preliminary lists of program participation and acceptance disseminated by Penn Abroad — the primary agency which governs semester and year abroad programs — typically sent to all participating students before their abroad semester. While students may elect not to attend their chosen program after the preliminary data is distributed, the vast majority of students participated in the program for which they were listed.
The data also includes a minimal amount of students who partook in yearlong abroad programs. These students were counted as if they participated in their abroad program during both the fall and spring semesters.
Wharton junior Shivam Raja spent the fall 2024 semester in India as part of an eight-student program that took public health policy- and gender sexuality-focused trips to different locations within the country.
“On the third trip, we got to live with an NGO non-for-profit organization that's been operating for 50 years, and the work that this organization had done was world-renowned,” Raja said. “They had literally changed villages and saved thousands of lives through rudimentary health practices.”
The students also spent four weeks on an individual research project, which Raja chose to spend with the same NGO.
“They actually had a [free] surgical camp during my four weeks and they brought in doctors from around the world,” Raja said. “It was an incredible experience where I got to help with all of these surgeries — they were all for free — and help them with their pre- and post-op care.”
The data revealed a significant disparity between the number of students studying abroad in the fall and spring semesters. Over the past two academic years, approximately 2.8 times more students chose to study abroad in the spring semester rather than the fall.
These figures also represent a halt to the increase in study abroad participation after the COVID-19 pandemic, which paused Penn’s offerings amid stringent health-related restrictions.
In the fall 2020 and spring 2021 semesters, Penn did not run study abroad programs and offered an extremely limited quantity of programs in fall 2021. 191 students were accepted to study abroad programs for the Spring 2022 semester.
While Penn Abroad also offers graduate study abroad programs, summer abroad programs, and global seminars — classes with a travel abroad component — this analysis focuses specifically on undergraduate semester abroad programs, the aspect with the highest participation.
“Across all of those programs, we send a little bit over 1000 undergraduates abroad every year,” Executive Director at Penn Abroad Kristyn Palmiotto told the DP. “In academic year 2023-24 we sent 607 students abroad [for a semester].”
The data also revealed that the majority of students studying abroad are in the College of Arts and Sciences, followed by Wharton.
Palmiotto attributed the disparity to the “much more flexible” curriculum offered by the College in comparison to the Nursing and Engineering undergraduate schools. She added that the majors for students in the College are “deepened and strengthened with a global perspective that really ties into the work that we're doing.”
Students in dual-degree programs, such as the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business — in which all students are required to go abroad for a semester to practice their target language — were attributed to the undergraduate school corresponding to the email they used to register for the program.
While no Nursing students are abroad for the current semester — or went abroad last spring — a small number have historically studied abroad in the fall semester.
Four students did so in the fall 2023 semester and six participated in the fall 2024 semester, including Nursing senior Benita Cui who spent the fall 2024 semester at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Cui’s program is currently the only nursing clinical exchange offered by Penn Abroad, according to Palmiottto.
“At Penn, I learned so much about palliative care and end-of-life care, and then I never got to really see it in real life, but at [the] University of Queensland, I got to see that and how families were reunited together for one of the last times,” Cui said.
The acceptance list also shows that students choose only a few study abroad destinations.
Although Penn Abroad offered a combined 19 approved programs in the Middle East, South America, the Caribbean, North America, and Africa, only six students studied in those regions in the spring 2025 semester. Instead, 79.1% of students who studied abroad this semester chose to participate in programs exclusively located in Europe.
Penn Abroad also offers programming in Israel every semester, however, no students chose to study abroad there last semester. In fall 2023, Palmiotto said that the University made the decision for students to “relocate out of the country” after “consultation with risk management.”
“On a case-by-case basis, we assess the health and safety to determine whether or not students will be traveling to Israel,” Palmiotto said.
Penn Abroad also offers two programs through the School for International Training in which students study in several locations over the course of one semester. One includes travel to New York; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Barcelona, Spain; and Cape Town, South Africa. The other features travel to Washington, D.C.; Delhi; Cape Town, and Buenos Aires.
In fall 2024, College junior Skyla Rimple was one of four Penn students who studied in the first of the SIT programs alongside 18 students from other institutions. Rimple said that she walked away from the experience of studying in four distinct cities with “a sense of what I'm talking about.”
“Academically, that feels really good,” Rimple added.
In the four most recent semesters, approximately 68% of all student participants chose to study abroad in one of just four countries: the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and Australia. These four are the only destinations to have at least 10 Penn student participants in each of the past four semesters. Italy, Portugal, and Denmark are also popular programs among Penn students.
London is the most popular abroad destination in the current semester, with 95 students — over 20% of the total undergraduate population studying abroad — choosing to participate in one of the city’s eight programs. It is followed by Sydney; Barcelona; Paris; Lisbon, Portugal; and Edinburgh, Scotland as the most popular programs.
College junior Stefan Hatch studied abroad at Queen Mary University of London with 14 other Penn students during the fall 2024 semester. He said that while a number of courses “maybe looked cool,” they were only available to full-time students. As a result, Hatch took courses that “ended up being almost all exchange students.”
Several programs — such as the ones to Mexico City and Beirut in fall 2023 — have only one Penn participant.
College senior Imani Rhodriquez spoke to the DP about her experience in Mexico City.
“I really got to learn or just view the world from a perspective that was outside of the one that I was used to,” Rhodriquez said. “Learning about the U.S. from outside of the U.S. — from Mexico — was a very valuable experience.”
College senior Riya Sinha spent fall 2023 in Lebanon and spring 2024 in Egypt. She was one of the only American students at the the University of Beirut.
“I knew that going into it a lot of the Middle Eastern programs are a lot less popular as students, but I really enjoyed it because it pushed me very much to get out of my comfort zone,” Sinha said. “I think the two places that I [visited] were really good for that, because they're very friendly cultures.”
Sinha said that the experiences changed her perspectives on “everything,” including her time at Penn, global politics, and the career she wants to pursue.
“I think that came from the experience of being in those two unique contexts, learning the things that I did, having the friends that I did who were Egyptian and Lebanese, and getting to have really interesting conversations,” Sinha said. “And also just witnessing firsthand how beautiful both of these countries are, just how much they have to offer.”
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