The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) (USA)

As Pennsylvania’s only land-grant university, Penn State has a broad mission of teaching, research, and public service. But that mission was not so grandly conceived in 1855, when the Commonwealth chartered it as a college of agricultural science to apply scientific principles to farming. Penn State’s website>>

Educating Active Citizens:

Student Engagement at Penn State Penn State University holds a simple but demanding conviction: higher education does not end at the classroom door. The university’s mission asks more of its students than mastery of content — it calls them to become active citizens capable of engaging honestly with the world’s most pressing challenges. To fulfill that promise, Penn State has built one of the most comprehensive student engagement ecosystems in American higher education, one that weaves together experiential learning, cross-cultural collaboration, community service, and leadership development across all 24 of its campuses. What sets Penn State apart is not any single program, but the deliberate integration of engagement into the full arc of a student’s education, complete with community partners, family orientation, and multilingual guides, to the capstone experiences that send fourth year students into communities in East Africa or South America, the university ensures that civic engagement is not an add-on, but a through-line.

Meeting Students Where They Are:

Engagement at Penn State begins with access. The university has invested deeply in reaching students who might otherwise be left out of global learning — first-generation students, underrepresented minorities, students with financial constraints, and international students navigating an unfamiliar country. Education Abroad’s establishment of a dedicated committee and an outreach coordinator produced striking results: participation among underrepresented students grew by nearly 22 percent, and first-generation participation rose by 20 percent. The Perreault Fellows Program exemplifies this commitment. Launched in 2018, it offers students from underrepresented backgrounds a rigorous multi-year curriculum in leadership and ethics, culminating in a subsidized internship abroad. Similarly, the Center for Global Engineering Engagement funds study abroad for its Clark Scholars — talented engineering students with significant financial need — ensuring that the cost of international experience never becomes a barrier to professional and personal growth. At Penn State Altoona, the Sheetz Fellows Program takes a comparable approach, fully sponsoring international travel to deepen students’ understanding of global business and opportunity. The Global Engagement and Leadership Experience (GELE) bring these values into focused, transformative form. This multi-day retreat draws international, first-generation, and underrepresented students together to explore questions of global leadership, unconscious bias, power dynamics, and personal identity — with costs subsidized to ensure broad participation. The program has proven so effective that Penn State’s strategic partner, Monash University in Australia, co-delivered GELE in 2018 and has since developed its own version of the model.

Learning by Doing:

The most powerful learning at Penn State often happens far from a lecture hall. The university’s experiential programs put students in direct contact with real communities facing real problems — and ask them to contribute meaningfully to solutions. The Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship (HESE) Program sends students to Kenya for immersive, community-embedded fieldwork, bookended by virtual collaboration with in-country partners before and after travel. Students arrive not as visitors but as co-designers of technology-based, sustainable solutions for marginalized communities. The Penn State Sustainable Communities Collaborative operates on a related premise domestically, connecting students from multiple disciplines with local leaders across Pennsylvania to address sustainability challenges. Over the past decade, that work has delivered $2.6 million in service in- kind to participating communities. International students are actively integrated into this model, gaining firsthand experience with U.S. governance and civic life. One recent participant developed an elementary school curriculum on pollution and environmental law, bridging global and local concepts in a single classroom resource. Engineers Without Borders at Penn State offers another model of applied engagement. Multidisciplinary undergraduate teams bring classroom knowledge to bear on infrastructure challenges in India, Uganda, Honduras, and State College itself — learning to navigate cultural context, community relationships, and the limits of technical solutions as much as the technical problems themselves. For students whose circumstances make travel difficult, the Experiential Digital Global Engagement (EDGE) Program offers a proven alternative. Inspired by the COIL model and piloted in 2018, EDGE pairs Penn State students with counterparts at universities abroad for sustained cross-cultural collaboration on shared academic projects. More than 160 EDGE projects have since been completed by faculty across 15 campuses, reaching thousands of students locally and internationally. Some projects incorporate the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) assessment, producing measurable evidence of growth in students’ intercultural competency.

Dialogue, Leadership, and Global Awareness:

Student engagement at Penn State is not only about going somewhere — it is equally about listening, reflecting, and learning to hold complexity. The World in Conversation (WIC) program, housed in the College of Liberal Arts, trains student facilitators to lead dialogues on difficult global topics, engaging thousands of participants annually. WIC’s reach extends far beyond campus: the program has facilitated conversations in active conflict regions and maintains partnerships with organizations including NATO. In every case, students are not passive observers but active architects of cross-cultural understanding. At the Abington campus, the Peer Action Global Learning Network (PAGLN) trains peer mentors, international student welcome leaders, and global ambassadors to support their classmates’ intercultural development. The program helps students build the skills, confidence, and networks needed for careers in a globally interconnected economy. These peer-to-peer models reflect a broader pedagogical conviction at Penn State: that students learn global citizenship not only from faculty and formal programs, but from each other. The Student Engagement Network (SEN) in University Outreach ties these co-curricular threads together through an app-centered platform that aligns students’ academic and personal interests with engagement opportunities across campus. By providing funding and structured reflection for participation in student organizations and academic initiatives, SEN ensures that engagement is not accidental but guided — and that students can articulate and build on their experiences over time.

Engagement Embedded in the Curriculum:

Student engagement gains its deepest traction when it is woven into academic coursework rather than layered on top of it. In 2018, Penn State’s University Faculty Senate endorsed a landmark report on global citizenship and global competency, establishing a formal Framework for Developing Global Citizenship to guide learning outcomes across the institution. That framework spurred the creation of the Global Learning Faculty Fellows Institute, which supports faculty across disciplines in integrating global perspectives, intercultural reflection, and civic awareness directly into their courses. In the College of Engineering, a pre-departure course (STS 115) helps students prepare meaningfully for study abroad. Assessment data show that students who completed the course felt significantly better prepared for learning abroad than their peers who did not — a reminder that structured preparation multiplies the value of every experiential opportunity. At the Brandywine campus, faculty collaborate across disciplines to co-design embedded study abroad programs, building campus-wide focus around a single country or region each year and using international engagement as a vehicle for multidisciplinary synthesis. Penn State’s vision of student engagement goes beyond volunteerism. It is a transformative strategy — grounded in reciprocity, humility, and respect for difference — for building more equitable communities and for developing the kind of citizens the world urgently needs.