The field of global education has spent years working to diversify the population of students who participate in global learning opportunities. From the work of Diversity Abroad to the tireless commitment of hundreds of individual professionals and from field-wide campaigns like Generation Study Abroad to scholarship programs like Gilman, the field has put in the work. And while there is still work to do, these efforts have paid off.  The population of students traveling globally is more representative of the rich diversity we find in colleges than ever before. 

This growth creates a real opportunity for institutions and global education professionals to think more intentionally about what duty of care means for students traveling with identities that carry potential unique risk — specifically students of color, students with disabilities, students of certain faiths, and LGBTQ+ students.

Through DA Global’s Global Education Student Experience Survey, we surveyed students across more than 200 institutions about their global education experiences, from program discovery to re-entry. Over half said they didn’t think their identity would be a factor prior to enrolling in their program. They had access to resources. They had advising appointments, peer mentors, and pre-departure preparation. They felt prepared in every conventional sense of the word.

And then they arrived at their program site. 

Once on-site, over half of those same students reported feeling stereotyped. Over half felt isolated. Nearly one-third experienced microaggressions. Almost 30% were verbally harassed at least once. The students weren’t unprepared in the logistical sense — they had their visas, their housing, their orientation packets. What many of them didn’t have was the destination-specific, identity-aware context that would have better prepared them to navigate location-specific identity dynamics.  

That gap — between the advising and resources students had and the preparation they actually needed — is the opportunity before our field.

An observation from discussions with many of DA Global’s institutional partners over the past year is that conversations about identity and travel risk are often the domain of the global education office; and that’s not completely surprising.  After all, on many campuses, global education offices manage the bulk of student travel. But student travel is broader than formal global learning programs. 

Global experiential learning — often sitting in a different office with different reporting lines  — also oversees student travel. This includes: international internships, global fellowships, service learning, and research focused travel. 

And that doesn’t include the independent travel students embark on while enrolled in a formal academic program abroad.

That’s a significant and diverse population of young people traveling abroad at any given time, often without the institutional support infrastructure that formal global learning programs provide — and likely without comprehensive identity-specific preparation and incident mitigation resources.

Thus, if institutions consider their responsibility to extend to student participation in non-formal travel connected to a formal program as well as independent global experiential programs, providing general and identity specific preparation for all student travelers, not just those on structured programs, is of critical importance.  

The corporate travel sector has begun to grapple with this. Recent reports from the business travel industry show that while organizations have made progress supporting solo women travelers and employees with accessibility needs, most travel programs still lack structured support for LGBTQ+ travelers, racially marginalized employees, neurodivergent travelers, and religious minority travelers. The student travel market is navigating a similar terrain, just with younger, often less experienced travelers, in higher-stakes developmental moments.

When students were asked which aspects of their identity affected them most on a daily basis during their global experience, the responses were consistent: race and ethnicity (30%), gender (18%), nationality (14%), religion (10%), and sexuality (8%). These aren’t abstract categories. They’re the lived experiences that shape a student’s wellbeing and how they are perceived, treated, and supported — or not — in a given country and context. 

What students said they wished they’d had is just as telling. They wanted more nuanced preparation for navigating microaggressions and stereotypes. More guidance on local cultural dynamics around race, religion, and gender. More community — not just information, but connection to others who understood their experience.  

That’s not a criticism of global educators at institutions or provider organizations. It’s a reflection of what destination-specific, identity-aware preparation could add to student’s global experiences that already have strong logistical foundations.

This matters even more right now. Parts of the world are becoming more polarized, particularly around race, religion, gender, perceived nationality, and sexuality. Legal landscapes are shifting. Social climates of some popular destinations that were once perceived as open and navigable for students of all backgrounds, are becoming more complex. A destination that carried one set of considerations five years ago may look quite different today for a student whose identity intersects with those fault lines. None of this is a reason to pull back from global engagement. It’s a reason to go deeper on what preparation means and to recognize that generic pre-departure frameworks weren’t designed for this level of specificity or this rate of change.

So what does truly personalized preparation actually look like and is the field — those who look after student global mobility in its broadest sense — getting there?

We can’t ask these questions without an honest assessment of where the field is right now. Many offices are working with fewer staff while managing increases in student interest and need for personalized support. Global travel risk offices, also with staffing constraints, often oversee campus travel as a whole, not just global learning.  With limited staff bandwidth and students traveling across dozens of countries at various times throughout the year, the need for identity-aware support is recognized,  but it’s also genuinely hard to scale. A pre-departure orientation can cover a lot of ground but it can’t cover everything for everyone. And the honest question the field needs to sit with is whether we’ve quietly settled for good enough when it comes to preparation — not because the desire to do more isn’t there — it is — but in today’s landscape, doing more can feel logistically impossible.

A few questions we can ask, both at an institutional and individual level: Have we defaulted to “our campus hasn’t had an incident” as a proxy for “our students are well-prepared”? Have we assumed that because resources exist, students know how to use them — and that the resources we have match the questions students are actually asking once they’re on the ground?

The research suggests a gap. Students arrive thinking their identity won’t be a factor. Many find out it is. And the support they turn to most — peers, family, personal research — is largely outside the institutional infrastructure that’s been built to support their preparation and safety. 

Personalized preparation at scale isn’t about creating a custom advising session for every student traveling to every country. It’s about building identity-informed and destination-level insights into the existing advising infrastructure — accessible to students before they need it. It means moving beyond general health and safety frameworks to content that addresses what a student with a particular identity is likely to encounter in a particular place — the cultural dynamics, the legal landscape, the social context, the community resources. And it means building in identity-specific preparation as a standard part of the experience, not an add-on for students who ask.

That design challenge is part of what shaped how we built BeGlobali, including in-depth country culture and belonging insights and general and identity-specific health and safety training, all available to students on their devices.  The goal wasn’t to replace the advising relationship. It was to extend it and to give students access to layered, destination-specific, identity-aware context that scales in ways that time-strapped global education offices rarely have the capacity to do. Or, to allow global offices to leverage in-depth asynchronous pre-departure training for general health and safety topics, freeing up time for deeper one-on-one advising or live — synchronous or in-person — sessions that explore topics of culture, identity, and belonging.

The diversification of the global student traveler is an exciting shift. It’s one our field has and continues to work toward. We’ve invested in recruitment, scholarships, and professional development to make this happen. Now, the profile of student travelers is more diverse. At the same time the world has become more complex. This moment calls for us to invest more deeply in our people and infrastructure to ensure student travelers of all backgrounds are prepared to travel as their full selves, which will position them for success — academically, professionally, and from a health and safety lens.

This blog was written by Andrew Gordon. Andrew is an award-winning social impact entrepreneur and leading voice in global education, edtech, inclusive student success and workforce development. As founder of DA Global Access Network, an educational consortium and strategic partner advancing access to global opportunities, he has spent nearly two decades helping higher education institutions strengthen academic achievement, career readiness and institutional impact through access to global education. Learn more about Andrew.