Illinois Abroad and Global Exchange fosters intercultural competence and inspires global engagement for students University-wide by offering quality education abroad programs and comprehensive support throughout their study abroad experience.
IAGE works with the campus community to facilitate numerous education abroad opportunities. Last year, nearly 600 students studied abroad on IAGE-sponsored programs, comprising 27% of the campus total of outbound students. Of these students, over 96% participated in semester- or year-long programs.
Recognizing the value of education abroad, IAGE works actively to promote those opportunities to the student body. A new outreach protocol allowed IAGE to collect student data from over 1,110 students at these outreach events. To that end, IAGE did a number of outreach events during the 2017-18 academic year, including 15 programmatic or discipline-focused info sessions, 25 classroom or RSO (registered student organization) presentations, 9 IAGE-sponsored events, 8 collaborative events, 28 tabling events, 58 workshops, and hosted domestic and international partners on 25 visitor days.
Improving Our Services
This past year IAGE began undergoing an extensive internal review of its program array, currently 150 programs across over 40+ countries, by assessing student enrollment trends, exchange balances, academic strength areas, unique value-added programmatic features, levels of student support, opportunities for enrollment growth and improvement.
IAGE is also the lead unit to oversee study abroad data management at the University and has completed a system migration in June 2018 to the latest software version for application management and program promotion. We expect the latest features to enhance program discovery and streamline advising for study abroad and visiting non-degree international exchange students across campus.
What to look forward to in 2018-19!
The University of Illinois has been selected as a CIEE Passport Caravan host institution for the 2018-19 academic year. This event is part of CIEE’s support of Generation Study Abroad, an initiative to make study abroad possible for more U.S. students. In collaboration with CIEE, IAGE will be hosting a Passport Caravan event, which will provide 150 free passports to Illinois students.
