Inspiring Ikigai

Why Student Travel Is One of the Most Powerful Paths to Ikigai

I just returned from the EF Global Education Advisory Council meeting — a gathering of educators, researchers, and thought leaders who share an unshakeable conviction: that the experience of traveling, truly traveling, changes young people in ways that are difficult to measure and impossible to overstate.

I walked away rejuvenated. Not because I learned something entirely new, but because I was reminded, with fresh urgency, of something I have believed my entire career: the world is the most powerful classroom we have ever created, and we don’t use it nearly enough.

This week’s Inspiring Ikigai is a special edition. It steps outside the school building to ask a question that I think every educator, parent, and community member should be wrestling with: What if one of the most important things we could do for a young person’s sense of purpose is to buy them a plane ticket?

A Quick Refresher: What Is Ikigai?

For those new to this series — ikigai is a Japanese concept meaning, roughly, “reason for being.” It lives at the intersection of four questions: What do I love? What am I good at? What does the world need? And what can I be paid for or contribute? When all four circles overlap, you find ikigai — a life of purpose, engagement, and meaning.

In school terms, we’ve spent too long focusing on that last question and not nearly enough on the first three. Travel, I will argue, is one of the most potent tools we have for helping students explore all four — simultaneously.

What the Research (and Experience) Tell Us

Study after study has confirmed what those of us who have watched students return from international trips have known intuitively: student travel creates measurable gains in empathy, global awareness, intercultural competence, and self-confidence. But beyond the research, I have watched something harder to quantify happen.

Students who travel don’t just learn about the world. They learn about themselves — often for the first time in a way that sticks.

There is something about being genuinely out of your comfort zone — navigating an unfamiliar city, eating food you can’t name, watching how another culture celebrates or mourns or gathers — that strips away the performance of identity that teenagers master so effectively in their home environment. In its place, you see something more honest emerge.

They discover what they love when there are no parents or peers to tell them what they should love. They discover what they are good at when circumstances require real skills — communication, adaptability, leadership — rather than test-taking. They witness what the world needs with their own eyes, not through a textbook or a screen. And they begin to imagine what role they might play in it.

That is the ikigai journey. And travel accelerates it.

A Girl from Rural Kentucky and a Plane Ticket That Changed Everything

I know this not just as a researcher or a policy advocate. I know it in my bones.

I grew up in rural central Kentucky, the daughter of an immigrant mother who had built a life in America with the kind of quiet, determined sacrifice that doesn’t make headlines but shapes everything. For years, my parents talked about taking us to England — to meet my mother’s family, to see where part of me came from. What I didn’t fully understand as a child was what that dream actually cost. My parents saved for ten years. Ten years of watching bills carefully, of saying no to smaller things, of holding onto something larger. And then one summer, when I was a pre-teen, we went.

I am not sure I have the words, even now, to fully describe what happened to me in those weeks. The world cracked open. I saw that the way we did things in our small Kentucky town was not the only way — not better or worse, just one note in a much larger chord. I met family I had only heard stories about and felt, viscerally, that identity is layered and wide and full of roots you don’t know you have until you stand in the soil where they grew.

That trip didn’t give me answers. It gave me questions — the best kind. The kind that take a lifetime to explore.

I went on to study abroad in college, and something that had been lit in me as a child became a fire. Since then, I have been to more than 30 countries, and I am still going — still seeking, still learning, still finding in each new place some new dimension of what it means to be human and what role I might play in this world. Every trip has added a layer to my ikigai. Every encounter with a different culture has refined my understanding of what I love, what I am good at, and what the world needs.

My parents’ ten years of sacrifice gave me a gift I have spent a lifetime unwrapping. That is what is at stake when we talk about student travel. Not tourism. Not Instagram. Not a line on a college application. A life unlocked.

Six Competencies. One Passport.

In the Durango School District, our Portrait of a Graduate describes the six competencies we believe every student needs to flourish in life — not just in college or a career, but in the fullest sense of what it means to be a human being in the world. Here is what I know after years of watching students travel: every single one of those competencies comes alive in ways school alone cannot engineer.

PoG Competency	How Student Travel Activates It
Empathetic Collaborator	Navigating unfamiliar cultures, working alongside students from other countries, and solving travel challenges together cultivate deep empathy that no classroom simulation can replicate.
Resilient Risk-Taker	Missing a train, struggling with a language barrier, or stepping into the unknown — travel is a masterclass in productive discomfort and learning to recover with grace.
Creative Problem-Solver	When plans change and resources are limited, travelers innovate. Students discover that resourcefulness is a muscle built mile by mile, not lesson by lesson.
Agile Thinker	Every new city, every cultural encounter, requires students to update their mental models, hold multiple perspectives, and adapt — core habits of mind that travel accelerates.
Confident Communicator	Communicating across languages and cultural norms builds authentic confidence — not the performance of confidence, but the earned kind that travels home with you.
Courageous Leader	Travel puts students in situations where someone must step up. The student who leads in an unfamiliar city often finds a leadership voice they never knew they had.

The EF Insight That Renewed My Conviction At the Global Education Advisory Council meeting, I was struck by a conversation about the long-term impact of student travel on career trajectories and civic engagement. Young people who travel internationally during their school years are significantly more likely to report a clear sense of purpose in adulthood, to work across cultures effectively, and to describe their schooling as meaningful. That is not a small thing. That is ikigai, measured in decades.

The Equity Imperative

I want to name something directly, because it is the question that keeps educators up at night — including me: travel is not equally accessible. The student whose family has financial resources, whose parents can take time off work, whose passport is already filled with stamps — that student has access to a form of learning that is categorically different from what we offer inside our buildings.

That is not acceptable. And it is not inevitable.

Organizations like EF have been working for decades to expand access to student travel — through scholarship programs, group pricing, and partnerships with schools in under-resourced communities. In the Durango School District, we believe deeply that the experiences we design for our most advantaged students should eventually become the floor, not the ceiling, for every child we serve.

Equity in education means equity in experience — and there is no richer experience than encountering the world with open eyes and a willing heart.

This is a long-term commitment, not a single program. But it begins with schools deciding that global experience is not an enrichment add-on for a few — it is a core component of what it means to graduate prepared for the world.

When Students Come Home

I have had hundreds of conversations with students who have returned from international experiences. The ones that stay with me are never about the monuments they visited or the cities they checked off a list.

They are about the moment a student from rural Colorado connected with a peer from a country she had only seen on a map — and felt, for the first time, that the world was smaller and more human than she had believed. They are about the student who said, quietly, after a service experience in a community very different from his own: “I think I finally know what I want to do with my life.“

That is not coincidence. That is ikigai, activated.

Travel doesn’t hand young people their purpose. But it creates the conditions — the discomfort, the wonder, the encounter with genuine otherness — that make purpose possible to discover. It plants the seed. And those of us who design learning experiences for young people have a responsibility to plant as many seeds as we can.

What You Can Do — Starting Today

Whether you are an educator, a parent, a community member, or a school leader, here are the questions I’d invite you to sit with:

• For educators: Is there an international partnership, exchange program, or travel opportunity that could be woven into your curriculum — not as an add-on, but as a capstone learning experience?
• For school leaders: Does your strategic plan include global learning experiences as a priority? If not, what would it take to change that?
• For parents: Have you had a conversation with your student about what they are curious about in the world — not as a career path, but as a human being?
• For community members: Are there ways your organization or resources could help make international learning experiences more accessible to students in your community who currently cannot afford them?

A Note on EF Educational Tours EF has been one of the most trusted partners in student travel for more than 50 years. Their Global Education Advisory Council brings together educators from across the country to share research, best practices, and the kind of honest conversation about the future of learning that I find deeply nourishing. If you are looking for a starting point for student travel at your school, I’d encourage you to explore what they offer — not just as a logistics provider, but as a partner in purpose-driven education.

The World Is Waiting

Ikigai, at its heart, is about living a life that is fully yours — a life aligned with what you love, what you are good at, and what the world genuinely needs from you. That kind of life is not discovered in a classroom alone. It is discovered at the intersection of preparation and encounter.

We prepare students inside our buildings every day. The encounter — the real, irreducible, life-changing encounter with the world — that is something we have to send them out to find.

The world is waiting. Let’s help our students go meet it.