Reply #209: Yes, that's another thing, travel

[Lydia Leftcoast]

One of my former colleagues and his wife decided to spend six months backpacking around the world before they had kids. When they came back, they reported that they had met countless numbers of Europeans, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians, and Israelis in their travels, but very few Americans.

As I look at international travel boards, I see that students in those countries often take what they call a "gap year" between secondary school and university or between university and settling into a career. They are helped by a program called the Working Holiday Visa, in which people under a certain age (usually 30) whose country participates in the program --participants include Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, France, Japan, Korea, and probably some others I don't know about-- can get a special visa to work for 6-12 months in any of the other countries. A lot of the young people teaching English in Japan and Korea are there on Working Holiday Visas.

But does the U.S. participate in this wonderful program? Nooooo.

Do young Americans routinely backpack around the world? Noooo, because they have tens of thousands of dollars of student loans to pay off. Even if they do have the money, they often aren't interested. A recurring battle as a language instructor was persuading students to participate in a study abroad program. They'd tell me that if studying abroad caused them to delay their graduation, they'd lose so many months of lifetime income. :banghead: Even if you're already affluent, making money is more important than learning about the world firsthand.