Courtney Peavy, a student at Tuskegee University, had no plans to study abroad in college. She thought it would be too expensive and didn't want to burden her parents with the additional costs.
But Peavy's plans changed after she took a class with Rhonda Collier, an English professor who also directs the Alabama university's global office and organizes an international education fair every semester.
Collier had her students attend the fair. Peavy went and learned that studying abroad was not as out of reach as she thought and that there were many ways to pay for it.
"I was just inspired," Peavy said of realizing that "I could potentially have the opportunity to go somewhere, if it was Africa or the Virgin Islands, anywhere."
During the fair, Peavy had stopped at the table of Global Incite, a study abroad provider founded by a Tuskegee alumnus, and picked up an application.
Collier, for her part, applied for and received a $20,000 grant from Delta Airlines' foundation to support the travel of several students, including Peavy.
The next thing she knew, Peavy was flying to South Africa to study abroad. "That was a chance of a lifetime. We had the opportunity to go and pay out of pocket little to nothing."
Peavy and her classmates are part of a growing number of students from historically black colleges and universities like Tuskegee who are studying abroad. While they traditionally study abroad at lower rates than the general student population, a total of 2,036 students from HBCUs studied abroad in 2015-16 compared to 1,605 students in 2013-14, according to statistics from the Institute of International Education (IIE), which does an annual survey of study abroad enrollments.
The increase is noteworthy because African American students are generally underrepresented among students studying abroad: black students make up about 14 percent of all students enrolled in U.S. higher education but account for just 5.9 percent of students studying abroad. And at HBCUs, just 3.4 percent of students study abroad during their undergraduate careers, compared to a 10.4 percent participation rate for students across all institutions nationally, according to the IIE.