Most conversations about a school trip or university programme start with the destination. The research behind our new white paper, Designing Youth Travel Programmes for Gen Z, suggests they should start somewhere else.

Two sets of evidence are pointing in the same direction. The first describes the young people arriving on these programmes. In Deloitte’s 2025 survey, 48% of Gen Z respondents said they do not feel financially secure, and 80% of Gen Z respondents to GWI’s research had felt lonely in the past year. The second describes the employers waiting for them at the other end. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 ranks resilience, flexibility and agility (67%) and leadership and social influence (61%) just behind analytical thinking as the core skills employers need most.

A well-designed programme can help build those skills, and the word carrying that sentence is “designed”. Design is something a school leader, trip coordinator or agent can test before anyone signs, so here are the seven questions we would put to any provider, ourselves included.

1. Has your provider asked for your learning outcomes?

The strongest programmes start with what the school or agent wants students to take home, such as resilience, intercultural confidence or a specific curriculum link, and the itinerary is then built to serve it. This is where every DET programme begins, across all six formats: we ask our partners for their intended learning outcomes first, and design the week around them.

2. Where is the unstructured time?

A week that moves from one scheduled activity to the next leaves students no room to make sense of what they are seeing. This generation reports very little daily time outdoors and offline, so guided reflection, walking and time simply spent in a place are doing real work in the programme rather than filling gaps in it.

3. What does the host community gain, and who decided?

WYSE Travel Confederation research found that more than 80% of young volunteers believed their hosts had also benefited from the exchange, which tells us young travellers already expect the relationship to run both ways. The useful test is who set the priorities. In a well-designed programme, the community identifies the need and the visiting group contributes to work the community already leads.

4. Which skills will students be able to name when they get home?

Research cited by NAFSA and IIE links international experience with stronger early-career outcomes. A good programme helps students connect a specific activity to a specific skill they can later describe in an application or interview, and it stays honest about what one week can and cannot build.

5. Which discomforts have you kept on purpose?

Good risk management protects physical and emotional safety, and it should. It should not remove every moment of productive difficulty. The Forum on Education Abroad’s 2025 research points to getting lost, reading an unfamiliar room and repairing a misunderstanding face to face as the places where much of the learning happens, so ask which of those moments a provider has designed for and how students are supported through them.

6. Who is paying, and can the whole cohort afford to take part?

For most school programmes the cost falls on families, and a price only some families can meet quietly decides which students get the experience. Clear costs and the option of a shorter or modular format help a school defend the price to its parent body and keep the programme open to the students it is meant for. University cohorts may be paying their own way, and with more than half of Gen Z respondents in Deloitte’s survey living paycheque to paycheque, the same clarity matters even more there.

7. How will we know it worked?

A satisfaction survey on the final day tells you how the week felt. When a programme claims to build resilience or intercultural confidence, a short before-and-after reflection or a facilitator’s observation gives that claim something to stand on, and gives the school something concrete to report back to parents and leadership.

The white paper sets out the evidence behind each of these questions and maps the seven design principles against DET’s six programme formats. It also shows four DET programmes where those principles are already at work.