The Atlantic

Why Are So Few Male Students Studying Abroad?

More than 300,000 college students went overseas in 2016–17. Just a third of them were men.
Source: d3sign / Getty

Even as new enrollments of international students at colleges in the United States have declined over the past two years, the number of American students studying abroad continues to grow. Some 332,700 students studied overseas in the 2016–17 academic year, up 17 percent from five years ago and 27 percent from a decade ago.

But one group of students is underrepresented in the surge of undergraduates going overseas: men. In 2016–17, women accounted for more than two-thirds of American students studying abroad, a proportion that has remained constant for more than a decade.

Colleges have the gender disparity on the simple fact that women outnumber men on campuses

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