ABSTRACT
From the moment they step onto the campuses of liberal arts colleges and universities, American students are inundated with advertisements promoting study abroad. In hallways and classrooms, glossy posters depicting faraway locations urge students to spend a spring break, summer, semester, or year encountering new people, places, and languages in a destination of their choice. By the time American undergraduates fi nally point to a program description in a seductively designed catalogue and declare their adventure of choice, they have both unconsciously and consciously been absorbing the images and rhetoric of international education advertisements for years. Although dedicated international educators often encourage global citizenship education with a focus on civic engagement and cross-cultural respect, program advertisements appeal instead to American students’ sense of entitlement, consumerism, and individualism. This institutionalized commercial rhetoric infl uences how students approach international education, the quality of education in which they are prepared to engage, and, ultimately, the political and social foundations of our future.1
