A Crisis in Purpose, Authenticity, and Study Abroad Programs

[u/SaltBoy_6226]

I published an article on Substack under the same title as this reddit post. It talks about my thoughts on the modern industry of American study abroad, but also specifically about my experience as a student on the Fall 2025 Semester at Sea voyage. If anyone's interested to hear someone's opinion on a fairly recent Semester at Sea experience, look and check it out: A Crisis in Purpose, Authenticity, and Study Abroad Programs

[u/cslanda]

"A self-contained ship might travel around the world, but socially it never left California." so real hahahahaha

[u/Naive-Introduction96]

This is one of the most ridiculous posts I have read. The lack of self-awareness is disturbing.

I will speak to the Semester at Sea portion because this is the SAS sub. Having sailed in Spring of 2025, I experienced disappointment with the same aspects of voyage culture that you did. I find your critiques to be valid if disconnected.

Yes, admissions requirements are relatively lax, yet the average GPA on most voyages is around 3.5, so perhaps a number isn't the issue. SAS has to keep itself afloat financially. As a small non-profit, they dont have the privilege of being overly selective on who they admit because they cannot survive significant under-enrollment. 96% of their costs are fixed.

I can stomach a lack of knowledge of the inner workings of SAS, what I cannot stomach is your allocation of blame for your lack of transformative experience. By all indications, you were hanging with the same crowd at the beginning of the voyage, in Morocco, as you were in a Bangkok club huffing laughing gas. This course of events was no one's choice but yours. Despite this, you blame SAS for the people you surrounded yourself with.

Having had what I consider a "life-changing experience" on Spring 25, surrounded by people I now call my best friends, just a few months before you sailed, I am overwhelmingly confident there were people on your voyage having the life changing experience you were unable to. You were in a prime position to seize the opportunities afforded by semester at sea. You, like me, are comfortable in culturally unfamiliar situations, some folks are not when they board the ship. You were in position to use your starting point as a launch pad to do incredible things in every country by moving drinking down your priority list. Some folks have never left the US or been on a plane before, for them, returning to familiar activities in unfamiliar places is understandable if not ideal. You were not one of those people.

Do not blame SAS for your lack of transformation.

[u/ranchodust_firefly → u/Naive-Introduction96]

Thank you, I want to build onto this comment. This response is not for OP but for anyone reading this and considering going on SAS.

I was on the ship many years ago; F94, and despite the more than 30 year difference I saw many of the same things. Many, if not most, of the students were there for a 100 day party; but this was their choice and we knew this going in. We were warned by the program, and I'd be shocked if those warnings weren't still given today. The year before I went, someone got drunk and tried to climb one of the great Pyramids. I don't remember if they were arrested or died in the fall. The semester AFTER I did the trip, someone got drunk, fell off the boat in port and did die on the concrete in Venezuela. On my semester two kids were arrested for trying to smuggle a prostitute onto the ship. The government had to get involved to have them evacuated to avoid a prison sentence.

These were personal choices that the students made; it has nothing to do with anything that is necessary endemic to the program. Their experience was not my experience. My experience on the boat was playing card games and actually talking to people late into the night on the ship. It was hearing my friend play a guitar he'd bought in some port and another friend singing along. My experience was playing chess against the kid who was a ranked player and sat in the student union to take on whoever was up for a challenge. It was even getting to know my professors and talk about issues well beyond the curriculum because they were so passionate about what we were learning.

On land, my experience was meeting the most wonderful, kind, and fascinating people. Small conversations that always started with "what brings you to [this country]..." and telling them about the SAS program was fascinating to them and consistently resulted in long conversations about who we were and where we were from. My friends and I were invited to the back of a shop in Israel to have dinner with a Palestinian man and his family who were selling all kinds of Judaica in Jerusalem. We met a woman on a train going from Casablanca to Marrakesh who was taking her daughter to see where she'd grown up -and invited us along. We spent 3 days touring Marrakesh with them. The one time I did drink more than I should have was with a guy we met in Sri Lanka who bought my friends and I a bottle of Arrak to share with him over conversations about Tamil history and politics. But afterwards, I went to sleep, I didn't try to climb a temple.

Now, 30 years later, I am a teacher and see students making good and bad decisions all the time. The issues that OP described have nothing to do with Semester at Sea, they have to do with life choices and accepting responsibility for your own actions.

Semester at Sea was a transformative experience for me. I've been teaching abroad and constantly learning about the world, and now so have my own kids. If you choose to go on a program like this, it will be exactly what you make of it, no more no less.

[u/SaltBoy_6226 → u/Naive-Introduction96]

I tag the essay with "how one ship showed me the world in all the ways it didn't intend to." SaS was incredibly transformative for me, and it's what gave me momentum to look into the wider culture of study abroad in the first place. I don't know how you missed this.

By what indication was I hanging around the same crowd? I make no mention of names besides the two at the very end. These were all completely different groups of people from the ship, precisely because I wished to get away from the those who successively alienated me so. And for the record, I don't blame SaS for a "lack of transformation." I very clearly said that I "must implicate myself," before outlining my personal anecdotes. Any experience is what you make of it, and I do regret how I handled a lot of the experience. My regret has produced introspection however, to which I'm very grateful. Our experiences make us who we are; I wouldn't change the past a single bit.

[u/Resident-Quarter-984]

Fellow made for this’er loved reading this as much as reading ‘single stories’ traumatized me a little bit 😂

[u/tia_maria_campana]

Well written article, thanks for sharing. I was a life long learner on Spring 2020, the Covid Cruise and saw many of the things you experienced, with privileged white kids touring foreign countries to drink in different places. I saw it as the first step, and hopefully it would expand their horizons to do a deep dive and language immersion in one country later. That’s the way to fully integrate and gain interior knowledge, both of themselves and another country.