AbroadOffice Overview

What is AbroadOffice?

AbroadOffice is a complete, patent-pending solution that radically reduces the cost and effort required to run even the largest study abroad office.

AbroadOffice provides an advanced customizable study abroad website integrated with a student and program database. The features and functionality of AbroadOffice far exceed those of most in-house solutions and are comparable with or better than commercial systems costing tens of thousands of dollars.

AbroadOffice gives every school, regardless of size and enrollments, the ability to effectively manage a growing number of study abroad students and programs, through a user-friendly website and integrated online system.

Your AbroadOffice website is customizable for your college/university including your policies and procedures, your faculty-led, exchange, and third-party provider program listings. AbroadOffice is hosted in our corporate-grade IT facility and requires no software, hardware or IT support to use.

AbroadOffice is a FREE software service provided by Global Semesters as a capacity building endeavor to help advance the field of study abroad.

To see a full set of features, please see our features page or watch the online demonstration.

Why Did We Develop It?

AbroadOffice was initially developed during a joint initiative between HACU (the Hispanic Association of Colleges & Universities)  and Global Semesters with the objective of promoting study abroad for Hispanic students.

Part of our mission is to promote study abroad capacity building, including: student access, institutional support structures, student, academic and geographic diversity and best practices and standards.

We realized that many of the scholarships and capacity building efforts we offer might go un-used because hundreds of the HACU member colleges and universities we partnered with did not even have a study abroad office to support students interested in studying abroad.  Thus, we came up with the idea of creating a "virtual office" that fulfilled the basic functions of a study abroad office and could be customized to individual schools.  AbroadOffice is an outgrowth of that initial idea to create an online study abroad office for schools that neither had staff, facilities, expertise, nor administrative infrastructure to support study abroad.

During our capacity-building work, we also discovered that many study abroad offices did not have the resources to effectively and efficiently track program options and student applications and support functions.  For most colleges, developing a custom in-house technology solution can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and commercial systems were often outside the price range of study abroad office budgets.

We were dismayed that technology could be a barrier to program access so we built AbroadOffice to give all study abroad offices, regardless of size, the opportunity to effectively manage a growing number of students and programs.  

Is AbroadOffice Only for Global Semesters Programs?

No - the objective of AbroadOffice is to expand and promote access to a wide range of study abroad programs, schools and interested students!

You can use AbroadOffice to manage any and all programs without restriction, including faculty-led, exchange and third-party provider programs. Your in-house programs (faculty-led and exchange programs) are featured above all other programs.

AbroadOffice comes with a comprehensive external provider program database and allows you to select which study abroad providers and programs appear on your website. Any program providers that are not in our database can be added upon request.

Your own in-house, exchange, or faculty-led programs can be added easily and managed through customizable online applications.

Are There Hidden Costs?

There are no costs of any kind associated with AbroadOffice. We view AbroadOffice as our contribution to the field of international education and, as such, do not charge nor intend to charge for usage of this system.

AbroadOffice is a vehicle to promote capacity building, choice, transparency, access and best practices and standards in study abroad.

There are no financial or enrollment commitments or incentives associated with AbroadOffice and the program has no exclusivity requirements of any kind.