In the middle of a blistering August day, Tremaine Collins is standing on the platform of the Oku train station in Tokyo, punching a code into an app on his phone to pay for his ticket.
It’s a busy central hub in the Kita district, where passengers connect to an array of places in one of the most sprawling metropolises in the world.
Mr. Collins is getting the hang of navigating his new city. Today, he’s dressed in blue jeans, comfortable yet stylish silver low tops, and a multi-hued, brown plaid shirt mixed with maroon. His buttons are open, exposing a white tank top and a gold necklace and pendant.
Why We Wrote This
Study abroad benefits can be life-changing, in terms of retention, economic capital, and upward mobility. So why do so few Black men get that opportunity? One person described it as the $20 million question. Our reporter always regretted not taking advantage of study abroad himself, so he searched for Black male college students to document their overseas experiences.
He’s one of only two Black men on the busy platform at the moment – and one of relatively few in Japan. “I’m not here because I’m here on vacation,” he says. “I’m here because this is a goal that I always wanted to get here.”
Mr. Collins has just begun his first year at Temple University Japan, where about half of its 3,000 students are from the United States and roughly a quarter are from Japan. He is not simply doing a semester abroad program. He’s enrolled as a full-time student in a four-year undergraduate program.
This makes Mr. Collins stand out in other ways. Very few U.S. Black men attending a college or university take advantage of opportunities to study abroad. In the 2023-2024 school year, there were almost 300,000 Americans studying in other countries. About two-thirds of these students were white, according to the Institute for International Education, and 6% were Black. While men made up one-third of Americans studying abroad, Black men were only 2% of that total, experts say.
“I mean, this is the $20 million question, literally. It’s been a topic of conferences since forever,” says Tonija Hope, who leads the study abroad program at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically Black college. She and others want to know why Black males don’t study abroad and what can be done to get them to participate.
The benefits can be life-changing. Research indicates that studying abroad strengthens retention and completion rates. It makes job applicants more attractive to hiring managers, and it increases social and economic capital to further upward mobility.
Mr. Collins says he always wanted to do different things when he was growing up in Lorain, Ohio, a steel town on the shore of Lake Erie. He loved Pokémon and anime – Japanese animation – which his peers often mocked. Later, he wasn’t very interested in sports or hip-hop music.
He gets choked up remembering that time. “My dad wasn’t really in my life like that. It was really just my mom and my grandma.” He says feelings of neglect and loneliness always made him look in the mirror and speak words of affirmations to himself: I’m a good person, I have a good heart.
“I wanted to learn just how to be a better man and to be someone who’s brave, who’s courageous. Someone who’s intelligent and really in tune with themselves,” Mr. Collins says.
One thing he did wish to do was travel. No one in his immediate family had ever traveled outside the United States – not him, his older brother, or his two sisters. He made a radical decision: After he graduated from high school, to his family’s disbelief, he enlisted in the Air Force and was stationed in Montana.
“I didn’t really have nobody to believe in me until I did certain things that were outside the box,” he says, holding back tears.
After three years of military service, the GI Bill helped fund his college plans. The two schools he applied to were both overseas: a university in Rome and the American University of Paris, where he was accepted and attended for a year.
But a chance encounter with French police made him decide to leave. Officers stopped him and aggressively frisked him. The incident replays in his mind like a scene from a movie.
“They pull you over because you’re Black and maybe they think you fit a profile. It feels uncomfortable. You’re nervous and scared,” he recalls.
Between his semesters in France, he traveled. He visited several countries in Europe and then went to Asia, stopping in Tokyo. Before heading back to his Paris dorm, he had one more stop in Austria, but he says he kicked himself for not spending more time in Japan.
That’s when he decided to apply to Temple University Japan.
“I think if you have the opportunity to do something where you can explore outside of yourself, and if you want to not do it and blame it on fear, I think you’re doing yourself an injustice,” he says, wishing more people from where he grew up felt the same.
Overcoming the “4 Fs”
Decades ago, Margery Ganz, a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, wrote a paper, “The 4 F’s: Overcoming Barriers to Study Abroad,” an examination of the reasons Black students do not take advantage of overseas programs. The 4 F’s she identified are family, finances, fear, and faculty.
Studying abroad is a new experience for families, especially for first-generation or low-income students. But families can also limit opportunities simply because of their lack of familiarity with international travel and the value of such studies. Finances, too, might often be a problem for Black students, who, as a whole, don’t always have the resources of their white counterparts.
Fear of racism abroad is a major concern for Black students and their families. Living in foreign countries can heighten experiences of microaggressions and discrimination. There is also the fear of isolation and being the only Black student within a given program. Then there is simply the fear of the unknown.
In 2014, then-first lady Michelle Obama spoke about studying abroad during a trip to China, where she told students at Peking University in Beijing that she was afraid – and unaware of the full opportunities available to her when she was an undergraduate at Princeton University in New Jersey.
“The benefits of studying abroad are almost endless,” Mrs. Obama said. She spoke about the practice making Americans more appealing on the job market, more compassionate, and how it forces students out of their comfort zones.
Dr. Ganz’s final F – faculty – refers to the structural issues in study abroad programs, including insufficient outreach to Black students.
But there are other reasons for lower participation rates, says Dr. Hope at Howard. “There is a lot of speculation, but one to start with is the low enrollment rate in higher ed across the board,” Dr. Hope says. “When you already have low numbers, then how do you convince those that are in higher ed to go?” she asks.
But she also mentions a fifth F. “I would add, in the case of, like Howard and many HBCUs and probably universities generally: FOMO.
“At Howard, in the fall, you don’t want to miss homecoming,” Dr. Hope says. “If you’re pledging a fraternity or sorority, you don’t want to miss rush. And then, in the spring, you don’t want to miss other things. Elections for student government, you miss that. So there’s always something that is going to be missed.”
This year, too, all study abroad programs took a hit. In August, the State Department scrapped $100 million in cultural exchange programs, calling them “low priority.” President Donald Trump has also made it more difficult for foreign students to study in the U.S., which has advocates concerned about opportunities for American students seeking to go overseas.
“It is dire now,” says James Ham, director of international affairs at North Carolina Central University, of these cuts. But he believes funding will eventually return, and that schools have to be ready. “We have to find ways to continue to prepare our students going forward,” he says.
Dr. Hope says that, a decade ago, Howard students voted to be charged a $100 globalization fee for study abroad initiatives. She wants more to follow through and go. Last year, more than 200 Howard students studied abroad – but that’s still far from the 10% of students she would like to see.
“The goal for me is the longer term. You need to unpack a suitcase, you need to learn a bus route to get you somewhere, and you have to figure out how to do that on your own,” Dr. Hope says.
“If you saw what I saw”
Ruby Maddox devoted much of her career to getting more men to travel abroad.
In 2016, she helped found Leaders of the Free World, a nonprofit that works to empower Black men. She facilitated leadership training and international travel for her clients.
Ms. Maddox said studying abroad helped expand her own worldview in a profound way after she decided to visit Ghana in 2010. “I went over there to study urban agriculture for a summer,” she told the Monitor, reflecting on how she used a $5,000 student-aid refund to fund the trip, which she researched and planned herself.
Initially, her plan was, “I’m gonna go over there. I’m going to study urban agriculture and focus on the work that I’m doing.”
“And then it hit me,” she said during a Zoom interview this year, “there was the whole aspect of how I’m traveling abroad for the first time, in a country where everybody around looked like me.”
She saw Black professionals, professors, and government officials. Ms. Maddox says the experience of not being the “other” or being the only Black student in a room helped her make a shift in her life when she returned to Springfield, Massachusetts.
“To this day, I have no words. It’s like you see that the work is bigger,” Ms. Maddox recalled. “I felt like I wanted more young people to have this experience. I settled on a lot of the young men in my family and the young men in my community who had this potential that was off the charts, and I would say to myself, ‘If you saw what I saw, you would be unstoppable.’” Weeks after her interview with the Monitor, Ms. Maddox died unexpectedly.
The leadership nonprofit began, in fact, when she and co-founder Lavar Thomas took a group of men on a two-week trip to Ghana. After the first trip was a success, she continued to take groups of 15 or so Black college students from across the country. She partnered with schools including the University of Delaware, Prairie View A&M University in Texas, and New Jersey City University.
Dr. Ham at North Carolina Central is on the board of Leaders of the Free World, and he travels with the group to Ghana. For years, he worked with the Peace Corps, working his way up to country director in Uganda, Cameroon, and South Africa. He then served as deputy country director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Zambia, Guinea, and Ivory Coast.
When he started at the Peace Corps in 1996, he was the only Black man in his group, which also included one Black woman from Alabama.
“I want to inspire African Americans to really pursue these kinds of career opportunities, especially for our young, because when it comes to participation in international affairs and study abroad opportunities, we are the least to participate – and more so African American men are least exposed to that,” Dr. Ham says. “This has been my mission.”
The groups that Leaders of the Free World brings to Africa are hosted by faculty, students, and leaders at the University of Ghana in Accra. The exchange students focus on leadership and service, including political leadership. They do projects, such as building a kitchen for a school whose roof collapsed. They meet new people, try new food, and learn traditional African dance.
This was the vision of the late Ms. Maddox. “That really was the seed that I wanted to plant – that seed of seeing yourself being unstoppable, of seeing yourself beyond what they told you you were, even if for those two weeks you could step outside of those perceived boundaries that you had physically and mentally,” she told the Monitor.
“Not all butterflies and rainbows”
When he was a junior at Georgia State University, Timothy Mason studied abroad in Lisbon, Portugal, from August to December in 2024.
He loved it, but it didn’t come without obstacles. His family was afraid, but his worried mother eventually relented and let him go. She even flew with him to Portugal to help him settle in.
Though there were students from all over the U.S., Mr. Mason and a friend from Spelman College were the only two Black students. There was only one other person of color in their group of 20.
An environmental science major, Mr. Mason says he’s not uncomfortable in such white spaces, but being isolated in Lisbon highlighted differences.
“Our lived experiences are different, and it’s hard not to have somebody to relate to, because the white experience is very different from the Black experience when I’m trying to make friends with people,” he says.
In Portugal during the 2024 presidential election, for which he filed an absentee ballot, he discussed the results between former Vice President Kamala Harris, a Black and Asian woman, and President Trump. Some members of his group asserted that racism and sexism were not issues in the race.
“I feel like that’s something so present for me and I’m not even a woman, but just being Black and knowing that everything is not all butterflies and rainbows and that racism actually happens to people,” he recalls. “It was one of those things where I had to have patience.”
Nihongo nomi (Japanese only)
Days before classes start, Mr. Collins is participating in opening week activities. Today is a day to tour campus buildings, potentially meet faculty, and decide whether they want to join a student group, which ranges from everything from jiujitsu to the chess club. The day will conclude with a party and live music.
His tour guide, a senior named Kenya Douglas, walks a group of 20 students to the welcome center. Mr. Collins asks questions about navigating the city.
“If you see a sign that says Nihongo nomi (Japanese only) or Gaikokujin okotowari (No foreigners), don’t go in there,” Mr. Douglas warns. “Some places are not foreigner friendly.”
Mr. Collins is eager for the first day of classes. All courses at Temple University Japan are taught in English, but the art major wants to learn Japanese.
His first class, in fact, is Japanese Elements I. On the first day, his instructor, Takeda Sota, is going over hiragana and katakana, the writing shapes and characters for the Japanese language.
The first day went really well, Mr. Collins says, and he’s confident that he will be happy studying in Tokyo for the next few years. In fact, he can partially see the future, he says, when it comes to his time studying in Japan. “I think my older self is going to be proud of my younger self.”
“Sometimes, I feel you’ve got to step away from the culture to try to find out what you actually like,” Mr. Collins says. “That’s what we know, but if you don’t step outside of America and you’re African American … and that’s all you know is hip-hop culture? You don’t look outside to find out who you are.”
This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.
