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Interview and questionnaire data from approximately four hundred American students in France and from over five thousand Fulbright and Smith-Mundt grantees provide information concerning the sojourners' overseas interaction and postaward communication experiences as well as their evaluations of the personal development and professional consequences of their work abroad. Multivariate analyses of the survey data reveal that evaluations of professional development and prestige are closely related to the lecturers', research scholars', and exchange teachers' appraisals of personal development and over-all satisfaction with their sojourns. For students, however, professional and personal development appear to be alternative outcomes of study abroad: those reporting more extensive interaction with host nationals and greater personal development and satisfaction tend to be less settled in adult roles and less committed to academic goals; whereas those indicating that study abroad furthered their professional development and advancement tend to be older, advanced graduate students who incorporated data gathered abroad in dissertations for advanced degrees, enabling them to obtain college faculty positions. Implications of these findings in terms of the goals of agencies sponsoring international educational exchange are discussed. Downloaded from 44 AMERICAN institutions sponsoring educational exchange cite as their objectives the promotion of &dquo;international understanding&dquo;; the development of friends and supporters for the United States; assistance in economic, social, or political development of other countries; educational development of outstanding individuals; and the advancement of knowledge.1 Partly as a reflection of these goals, much of the evaluational research in crosscultural education has focused-ethnocentrically-on whether foreign sojourners do, in fact, develop more positive attitudes toward Americans and the United States in general as a consequence of their experiences here.Besides endeavoring to operationalize and assess the realization of the sponsoring agencies' goals, social scientists study the foreign scholar as a natural object for investigating international communication, stereotype persistence and modification, personality concomitants of the acculturation process, and intergroup interaction. Situations of cross-cultural contact offer unique opportunities to test the generality and limitations of hypotheses developed in one cultural context; furthermore, such research might contribute to the discovery of hitherto unanticipated interactions among variables.2 2 In the field of intergroup relations, for example, most conclusions derive from studies conducted in one cultural setting, where a common language and an over-all reference framework of commonly acknowledged values and norms may be taken for granted. Such assumed &dquo;con-1

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