Chair Joseph asks about usage of CUNY study abroad search engine

The CUNY Study Abroad search engine looks like a great tool for students to use and find study abroad opportunities.

How many students use it and how do you gather data on it?

And how do you judge whether it's successful or not?

I think we could do a better job at looking at usage rates.

It's a little difficult because we are all in such a concentrated space.

So using data about where the users are is not going to show us necessarily which campuses they're from.

We did not.

We made a conscious decision not to create sort of a login requirement so we could see exactly who was there, although that would have given us really granular data we could have followed up on.

But I think the 16.9% of students who are studying abroad on e-permit is an important indicator.

And another indicator I would really like to see grow is the number of campuses that are taking, where students are taking advantage of e-permit.

Because we know we have campuses that don't currently have the staffing to support their own programs.

But that does not mean that those students shouldn't have the opportunities to study abroad.

And there are opportunities, but as I mentioned,

If there is not a culture on the campus where students see peers taking advantage of those opportunities, you have a really tough time.

reaching just a sense where students feel like this is something that they should be investigating for themselves.