The Study Abroad Participation Gap: New 2026 Data

Most Students Who Want to Study Abroad Never Apply. The 2026 Via Market Report Shows Where They Go.

Study abroad offices have never been able to see inside the window between a student's first spark of interest and the moment they apply. That changes August 12.

Nearly 80 percent of incoming college students say they want to study abroad. Most of them won't. Your office knows who went abroad last year. You can pull participation by program, by term, by major. You know when advising got busy and when applications spiked.

What you cannot pull is the list of students who wanted to go and didn't.

They raised their hand. They browsed for weeks. They favorited a program in October and forgot about it by January. Then they went quiet, for reasons nobody in your office ever heard. Those students don't show up in participation data, because participation data starts counting at the finish line.

On Wednesday, August 12, the 2026 Via Market Report opens that window.

Why Open Doors Data Can't Show You the Participation Gap

IIE's Open Doors does exactly what it was built to do. It measures results at scale, rigorously, with a deep sample, and the field is better for having it. That reliability comes with a tradeoff: survey-based reporting at that size means the data reaching your desk are typically one to two years old.

So you get a dependable picture of who crossed the finish line, eventually. You do not get a picture of the months before the application, which is where most of the participation gap actually lives.

We made this case in more detail on the NAFSA blog in July, in Before the Numbers: The Story Open Doors Doesn't Tell. This post is about what happens next.

Five Questions About the Study Abroad Student Journey

1. How long does the discovery window actually last?

The stretch between a student creating an account and either applying or disappearing. Most offices have never had a number for this.

2. Where do the drop-offs cluster?

Attrition is not evenly spread across the window. Knowing where it concentrates tells you when an outreach nudge would actually land.

3. Which engagement signals separate browsers from appliers?

Some behavior predicts an application. Some behavior looks like interest and goes nowhere. The two are not obvious from the outside.

4. What do students say stopped them?

Self-reported barriers, in students' own words, from the point in the process where they stalled.

5. Which events actually drive applications?

Info sessions, orientations, fairs. All of them cost staff time. Not all of them convert.

How We Tracked the Study Abroad Discovery Window

The report tracks behavior starting the moment a student creates an account in their university's study abroad platform. That first action is the signal: someone raised their hand. Every session, comparison, and dormant stretch after that is data the advising office could not previously see.

Being straight about the scope matters here. This data begins at account creation. Plenty of students think seriously about going abroad and never get that far, and real conversations happen in classrooms and residence halls that no platform will ever capture. Those students are not in this dataset.

What the report covers is the window that follows: how long it runs, where it breaks down, and which students an office could have reached sooner if anyone had known where to look.

See the Findings First: Join the Webinar on August 12

Wednesday, August 12 at 12:30 PM ET. Brooke Roberts walks through the findings live in The Untold Story of the Study Abroad Student Journey. The full report is publishes the following Monday

Attend live and you see the data first. Otherwise it will be waiting for you on the Via Insights page.

Save your seat for the August 12 session →

Get the 2026 Via Market Report →

If you're rethinking how your office reaches students earlier in the process, Via Global is built around the part of the journey this report measures.