Katie Anne Scott was the only one of her friends to leave California for college. None of them understood her desire to leave, with so many terrific options for college in her home state. And yet to Ms. Scott, from San Diego, that was just the point. Staying in California meant she would not experience anything new.
 
After enrolling at Emory University in Atlanta and accommodating to the South, where the car culture and the demographics were radically different, Ms. Scott found herself applying similar logic to her options for study abroad.
 
“I might not have gone to Ghana if Emory hadn’t geared me for it,” Ms. Scott said during a Skype interview earlier this year from her adopted African home. “I just have one suitcase here, and that’s fine. But most of my friends here don’t have that experience, so it’s definitely been easier for me. Ultimately, it’s still just a plane ride.”
 
Ms. Scott is just the type of student of interest among advisers for studying abroad who are trying to figure out why sophomores and juniors choose to study where they do. While these advisers need to know how best to organize their annual budgets and which programs to finance or cut, many colleges are also busy strategizing how to effectively motivate students not just to go abroad, but also to choose developing countries — with emerging markets and less familiar cultures — as their destinations.
 
The correlation between going far from home for college and studying abroad in more challenging countries has not been studied closely, experts acknowledge, but more general indications of comfort level often prove determinative.
 
 A 2009 study by the National Association for College Admission Counseling indicates that the education level, income and travel experience of parents are the easiest ways to determine how far away a student is willing to go for college. Seventy-two percent of Americans go to college in their home state; only 16 percent end up enrolling in a school that is neither in their home state nor in a bordering state.
 
New research indicates that those same factors drive decisions to study abroad.
 
“It’s the conceivability factor: what seems conceivable for students,” said Nick Gozik, the director of the office of international programs at Boston College. “What does your family say? Here, there are socioeconomic differences. For students who come from less privileged backgrounds, getting to university is already a hurdle. Getting abroad feels like extra.”
 
Mr. Gozik began studying these trends at Duke University; he has since coordinated an assessment working group between Boston College and Duke to continue his research. Duke cites a host of variables that make it difficult to measure the importance of a student’s distance from home, ranging from household income to where in the world one’s college friends have chosen to congregate that particular semester.
 
“In national statistics as well as statistics here at Duke, students have chosen, on the whole, not to go to more challenging places,” said Margaret Riley, the director of the global education office for undergraduates at Duke, where just under half of all students study abroad. The top home state of Duke students is California.
 
The same ease of mobility that first allowed students to enroll in colleges throughout the country has also made studying abroad increasingly feasible: the decline in airfare costs since airline deregulation in the 1970s, growing college endowments that now extend financial aid to studying abroad, and the Internet, which allows students to keep in touch with their families and discover schools and programs far and wide.
 
“There’s a requirement that these students are going to have to be more independent,” said Bruce Poch, a former dean of admissions of Pomona College who is now a college counselor at the Chadwick School in California. “And there’s still an adventuresomeness to students who choose that path. There are just a lot of kids who don’t want to go to school with the same people they went to high school with, and they do that against a lot of pressure.”
 
At Grinnell College, where 65 percent of juniors chose to study abroad last year, the majority of students come from outside of Iowa. Grinnell’s study abroad office sees a willingness from those students to travel to more challenging places more consistently than is the national norm.
 
“What makes a student choose a safe location, versus one that’s more challenging, is an important question,” said Richard Bright, the director of off-campus study at Grinnell. “But we do know that most of our students are taking a flight here. So plenty of students are coming from distant parts of the country, and then they really go all over the world.”
 
Among the 1 percent of students enrolled at American colleges and universities who study abroad each year, three-quarters are Caucasian and two-thirds are female.
 
“I’m not sure who has the greater challenge: the student who has not been out of the four counties around their college who goes to Europe for the summer, or the student who comes to university from 2,000 miles away and then goes to Thailand,” said Joseph Brockington, the director for the center for international programs at Kalamazoo College. “But we know from research in the education abroad area that if Mom and Dad can’t imagine themselves in the location, they’re unlikely to let their kids go.”
 
“It’s not about whether they’ll have toilets that flush,” Mr. Brockington added. “It’s about whether their kids will be taken care of. So we try hard to dispel the rumors, but if Mom’s against it, it’s not going to happen.”
 
Grace Hancock of Atlanta, in a switch of sorts with Ms. Scott, is now a freshman at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Her thinking was similar to Ms. Scott’s on both her college choice and her options for studying abroad.
 
“The places I’ve been thinking about are definitely more exotic, because I want something further away that’s new and different,” Ms. Hancock said. She is considering New Zealand or Tanzania, where she plans to continue her studies in environmental science. “I’m already so far away, I think I can handle it just fine. It’s not as scary to go a bit farther.”