How Oregon State Leverages the IIE American Passport Project to Capture Study Abroad First-Timers
Ask any advisor: engaging undergraduate students early in their academic careers is an enduring challenge. At OSU, we enroll 38,000 students from 50 U.S. states and 105 countries. OSU is an R1 land grant university, and our diverse students choose from 200 undergraduate and 100 graduate degree programs through our 11 colleges and the Honors College. More than 30,000 of our students are undergraduates: 24% are first-generation to attend college, 29% are students of color, and 32% are Pell-eligible. There are several assumptions that cause students, especially first-generation students, to self-eliminate from applying for national scholarships—prevailing ideas are that these opportunities belong to students from elite institutions and with 4.0 GPAs. Over many years of engaging in this work, we have found a few strategies centered on mentorship, good communication, and intentional outreach. However, our most successful strategy has always been when students can get to know us through one-on-one interactions and building a relationship of trust. Motivating a first-year student to walk through our door is still a challenge, especially when they have competing priorities in a large, complex institution.
When IIE sent out the call for American Passport Project applications, I shopped it around campus—the study abroad, educational opportunity program (EOP), and other offices—imagining what a great opportunity this would be for our first-year students, especially those with high financial need. A U.S. passport is a powerful document that alleviates multiple barriers to participation in international experiential learning, and shifts students’ mindsets to a broader, more global scope of their undergraduate experiences and beyond. It occurred to me that this opportunity could be the key I’d been seeking to unlock engagement with first-year students: recipients of an IIE American Passport Project scholarship could be competitive applicants for the Gilman Program and potentially many other scholarships!
We applied for and received the IIE American Passport Grant and launched the program in 2023. In honor of OSU’s mascot, the beaver, we affectionately named the scholarship “Get a DAM Passport” and started outreach to first-year and first-year transfer students in the colleges of Agricultural Sciences and Forestry. The initial grant offered funding for 25 scholarships, and allowed us the opportunity to pilot the concept, create infrastructure for the application, selection, and award processes, perform assessment, and initiate a fundraising campaign to launch the program university-wide. We also created a self-paced Canvas course to assist recipients with obtaining their U.S. passports and connecting with our services to apply for study abroad scholarships.
In the two years since receiving our initial IIE American Passport Project grant, we have awarded 189 scholarships of $175 to cover passport fees and photos, an investment of $33,075—thanks to the support of an OSU Internationalization Grant, individual donations, support from the colleges, and matching funds from our Provost. All recipients were either first-year students or first-year transfers, all with high financial need, and representing 11 OSU colleges. To our surprise, 49% of the recipients are distance learners from OSU’s E-Campus. But the most important proof of concept: scholarship recipients are applying for and winning competitive national scholarships! Among our 2023 to 2025 “Get a DAM Passport” recipients, there were:
- 12 Gilman Scholarship applicants
- Five Gilman Scholarship recipients
- One Critical Language Scholarship applicant
- One Udall Scholarship recipient
- One Goldwater Scholarship recipient
I truly cannot explain how grateful I am for this scholarship and the ability to be able to travel abroad… Financially getting my passport was not very feasible, let alone paying for the trip itself, but both scholarships opened the world up for me to explore. During my time in Lyon our focus on systems thinking within commodities, food production, agriculture, climate change, and energy expanded my knowledge of the world and how each of us can impact one another. I learned that we are not just citizens of our own little piece of the planet, but citizens of the entire world.“
Elana Mansfield, OSU Student and “Get a DAM Passport” scholarship recipient
In a short amount of time, we have served students who may not have otherwise considered applying for national scholarships. We are actively identifying candidates among our applicants and recipients, doing personalized outreach and sharing our recipients’ study abroad aspirations with our global opportunities office. Through our low-cost “Get a DAM Passport” program, we have successfully formed relationships with first-year students and encouraged and supported them in pursuit of competitive national scholarships. We are grateful to IIE for the opportunity to pilot this concept with the American Passport Project.
Learn more about the impact of OSU’s “Get a DAM Passport” initiative.