David McCullough III on The American Exchange Project

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In this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Mason Pashia sits down with David McCullough III, co-founder of the American Exchange Project, to explore how domestic student exchanges can foster empathy, bridge cultural divides, and build lifelong curiosity. Learn how this innovative program connects high school students across the U.S., encouraging them to step out of their comfort zones, embrace new perspectives, and contribute to their communities. Tune in to hear about the transformative power of travel, the origins of the program, and its vision for creating a more united and empathetic future

Outline

• (00:00) Introduction and Background
• (04:31) Origins of the American Exchange Project
• (08:35) History of Exchange Programs
• (16:41) Current State of American Exchange Project
• (21:58) Program Structure and Activities
• (34:12) Future Growth and Vision

Introduction and Background

Mason Pashia: You are listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. We live in an incredibly polarized time. I don’t think that’s news to anyone. It’s basically a headline anywhere you look. One antidote to this division is powerful learning experiences—bringing people closer together, showing them things they had not seen before, and really building empathy muscles in everybody.

From understanding places to understanding people to understanding motivations. Recently, I got an email from an organization doing incredible work in this placemaking and experience-providing world. Today, I’m joined by David McCullough III, the co-founder and CEO of the American Exchange Project, a nonprofit organization that sends high school students on week-long trips to different parts of the United States to foster understanding and reduce polarization.

Mason Pashia: David, thanks so much for being here.

David McCullough: Thanks for having me and for the great introduction. What an excellent framing.

Mason Pashia: We talk about it a lot. So, I’m going to start with something I found on your LinkedIn that made me smile. What is one surprising skill that you gained from being a narrator and deckhand for Boston Harbor Cruises?

David McCullough: Yeah. So yes, I had two jobs for the Boston Harbor Cruise.

Mason Pashia: It sounds like it.

David McCullough: Four days a week, I was one part deckhand, one part theatrical performer for the kids aboard the Codzilla, which is both the demon monster codfish that haunts the outer depths of Boston’s outer harbor and the fastest speedboat in New England.

And then the other two days a week, I was on the opposite side of the age demographic, doing the 45-minute putt-putt historical cruise of the Boston Harbor, where it was a very different mess. I, you know, learned a ton about my city. This has actually been very true at the American Exchange Project.

It was amazing to me how little I knew about the city that I called home. I mean, I grew up in the suburbs here. I’ve spent most of my life in the Boston area. Almost all of the facts I was talking about during that historical cruise were new to me.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

David McCullough: Then I also learned how to drive a 12-horsepower jet boat and how to cut some very, very tight turns out in the Boston Harbor when our captain got a little sick of driving the thing.

Mason Pashia: Amazing. Yeah, I am sort of an urbanist-brained person. I love transit and all that kind of stuff. The thing I’ve always loved about biking is that on a bike, it fundamentally reframes how you see a city. You just notice things you’ve never seen before. You experience hills differently in topography. You experience all kinds of things differently. I can only imagine that doing that on the waterways of a major city like Boston, you also just totally see it differently. That’s how so many people came into the city to begin with. That’s how they navigated and brought things in. So that’s super cool.

David McCullough: We’re a seafaring town. And by the way, I just got a new bike. So I’ve been appreciating Boston from the cycling perspective for the last few weeks, and that’s its own thing. Traveling at the ground level, wherever you go, and no matter what way you travel—whether it’s on a boat, a plane, or your own two feet—make sure you’re looking around and paying attention. That’s where perspective is gained.

Mason Pashia: Totally agree. Okay, so I want to get into the meat of our topic today—not that we’re not talking about it already with placemaking and place discovery. Your backstory is fun. You did this cross-country road trip in college that really helped, I guess, generate this idea for the program you created. Tell me a little bit about that road trip—what you saw, what you learned.

David McCullough: So, in the summer after my junior year of college, I borrowed my mom’s car and drove 7,100 miles across the country. I spent two months living in three towns that were the opposite of the town I grew up in, in the Boston suburbs.

I was in Catula, Texas; Pine Ridge, South Dakota; and Cleveland, Ohio. I had not really intended for my own personal experience to ever be part of that road trip. I had received funding from my university to do a research project on education in some of America’s most impoverished communities. My little angle was that not enough folks researching the issue were talking to parents, teachers, and kids.

Origins of the American Exchange Project

David McCullough: Folks in the middle of it—they were focused at too high a level, in my opinion. My angle was I was going to hit the road. Rather than talking to experts, policy folks, and big-think people, I was going to talk to teachers, kids, parents, administrators, and folks in the middle of it. I was going to live in those towns for a little while, embed myself, and get to know what was going on. Out of all of that, I would try to pull together some ideas about what’s off in the grand strategy of how we educate our nation’s poorest children. That road trip changed my life in a few ways.

First, it was the most profound educational experience of my life. I had been to some incredible schools and had some wonderful teachers and parents, yet two months on the road had me learning more and generating more than any class I’d ever taken.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

David McCullough: In addition to that, I made friends—real, true friends. Before the trip, my school made me sign a paper that basically, in legalese, said, “If you get beat up, it’s not our fault.” I thought, “Okay, that’s where we’re beginning here.” Not only did that not happen, the opposite happened. Everywhere I went, I was welcomed, even adopted.

Many of the friends I made on that trip, 10 years later to this day, are still great friends. In fact, a few of them were at my wedding about two years ago. That struck me. Then the third thing that really opened my life up in a lot of ways was that it not only filled my heart with a profound sense of purpose and drive.

I had been a baseball player to that point. I wanted to be a baseball player. Every fiber of my being wanted to be a baseball player. During my junior year of college, the game of baseball basically told me, “You’re not a baseball player.” I was fresh off the Yale baseball team, and that road trip helped me figure out a new direction for myself.

Because I went around the country in the summer of 2016, I became the one kid at Yale who could explain why Donald Trump was the president.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

David McCullough: That issue of polarization and division, and the evident lack of understanding people on one side had for the other side, and the prejudices that grew from that ignorance became, right away, the kinds of issues I could shed some perspective on, though I was only 22 years old at the time. When I got back, a lot of the professors who were part of the program that sent me on that road trip took a great interest in what I had done and what I was coming back to talk about.

In the fall of 2018, after I’d finished my master’s degree, I linked up with one of those professors, a guy named Paul Solman, who’d been the economics correspondent for the PBS NewsHour for 35 years at that point—40 years at this point. Paul had done across his career what I had done across two months: namely, travel the country, talk to people, and ask a lot of questions. Over lunch, we agreed that traveling, being curious, and talking to whoever we ran into seemed to have within it some semblance of a solution to the forces we saw tearing apart our country.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

David McCullough: That’s where the conversation began that launched the American Exchange Project.

Mason Pashia: Do you happen to know the origins of these exchange-type programs? I know that the novel component of this is that it’s primarily domestic—you’re staying within the United States. Growing up, I knew exchange students from East Germany and a bunch of different places. I’m curious if you have a picture of what that looks like.

History of Exchange Programs

David McCullough: I think, as a culture and a society, we undervalue just how important these sorts of experiences are for young people. I don’t know that I’ve ever met a person who’s been on a study abroad who, when asked, doesn’t describe their experience as life-changing, terrific, one of the best things they’ve ever done—a highlight of their time at that school or university, you name it—with the sorts of superlatives that we’re after as teachers.

I often think that many of the innovations and ideas that are the foundation for how we educate young people were once thought of as niceties or privileges—going to school after 13, learning to read, arithmetic, studying the sciences, contemplating philosophy, you name it. Somewhere along the way, they went from a life-changing nicety to a life-changing necessity. When you look at the two-part history of study abroad, I think we’re at a moment where, in this country, we really need to start looking at these sorts of exchange experiences as necessities for young people, especially in an era where young people are too often robbed of those in-person social connections that are critical for their development in the name of spending more and more time on screens.

The history of study abroad is kind of broken, I think, into two halves. The first is the history of the coming-of-age ritual that so often involves leaving home, going to do something that is both valuable, full of developmental opportunities, challenging, and then infused with some of the flavors of the culture that young person has grown up in. The history of those sorts of experiences is almost as old as civilization itself. They are a marker of civilizations and societies that were very cohesive in their cultural identity. We can go all the way back to Sparta, who sent their children—you know, 300 has them off killing a menacing wolf that’s about the size of a dinosaur. That didn’t really happen, but they would send their early adolescents off to live in the woods for a year, and if they came back alive, they were Spartans. In a society that is very tough and demanding and priding itself on its warriors and its kind of “he-manly” spirit, that was indicative of Spartan culture. But Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, gap years, the Birthright Israel program, and the Erasmus program in Europe are much more recent. There are letters—Jonathan Haidt writes about this beautifully in The Coddling of the American Mind—there are letters from, I believe, 16th-century noble English parents talking about sending their children to continental Europe for a period as a valuable coming-of-age ritual.

So, the notion of going away, bettering yourself, and coming home is critical. When you go away and immerse yourself in another way of life, you learn from the world and then bring back to your world what you learn. The other history of study abroad is the one that is more tied to the programs that we see today at high schools and universities. The notion of going to another country, immersing yourself in that culture for your own betterment, was confined pretty much to the grand tour and was a marker in the raising of what our society’s elites would do. Think of your Edith Wharton novels. Think of John Adams sending young John Quincy off to Russia for years. He came back with seven languages and grew to be probably the most intellectually impressive president we’ve ever had.

After World War II, there was a great concern that all of the dehumanizing we had done to make the American public support the killing that the war required would be a real problem for the peace treaties we were trying to pass in that year. We would not like the thought that Japan was allowed to have a military again if we felt the things that Americans felt about Japanese people during the 1940s. We would not like the notion of buying German cars or entering trade agreements with Germany. Efforts began right after the war to rehumanize and reintegrate our culture with the cultures of the countries that we’d been at war with. In 1946, the American Field Service, which had been an ambulance corps before World War I and World War II and saw young nationals from different countries serve alongside each other, hauling wounded soldiers off the battlefield, becoming great friends, and understanding the power of these sorts of cross-cultural experiences, sent, in 1946, 40 Americans to high school in Germany and 40 Germans to high school in America.

Then the State Department started funding them. Through the State Department funding over the next decade and a half, you see program after program popping up—the International Cultural Youth Exchange, the Fulbright program, and eventually the Peace Corps. All programs were designed to get young people of an impressionable age out and into the world for school, for service, for work, you name it. Today, millions of young people a year study abroad all over the world, and hundreds of thousands of young people come to this country to study abroad. At the individual level, and perhaps even at the level of the educator and the parent, we see these opportunities as great, fun, engaging developmental opportunities for the people that get to do them. If you hover above the superstructure of the global youth exchange network, you realize that, in many ways, it’s actually a conflict prevention tool because we don’t want to believe prejudicial or conflicting ideas and thoughts about people that we’re friends with.

Mason Pashia: True.

David McCullough: After the EU formed, a few members of the early European Union felt that, for many of the same reasons the State Department felt we needed exchanges, unless they made efforts to create a cohesive European culture through the many cultures that exist across Europe, their policies would really be in the soup. About 20 years later, they established the Erasmus program, which funds young college students to spend a period of the year—I think it’s either a semester or a trimester—at another European university. Over the last 30 years, something like 14 million students have taken advantage of the Erasmus program. It’s so popular that the way we use the verb “Google” to say “internet search,” or the way certain parts of America say “Coke” when they mean any type of soda or pop, they say “Erasmus” instead of “exchange student.” Are you, you know, are you an Erasmus?

Mason Pashia: Interesting.

David McCullough: Today, the EU pumps 3.75 billion euros a year into that program.

Mason Pashia: Okay. I have a lot more questions. Before I jump into them, give me a picture of where the American Exchange Project is right now. How many students have you served? How do students participate in it—time of year, cost, that kind of stuff—just so our listeners can wrap their arms around the idea.

Current State of the American Exchange Project

David McCullough: Well, in a quick definition, the American Exchange Project is a study abroad program with a twist. Rather than sending young people to other countries, we send them abroad within America, treating towns that are culturally, politically, socioeconomically, and geographically very different from each other as if they were foreign countries to one another.

So, we’ll send kids from Boston to Dodge City, Kansas, and from Riggins, Idaho, to Palo Alto, California. The trips are a two-week experience where students travel to another town for a week and then tag along when kids come to their town for that week.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

David McCullough: To my earlier point about not knowing much about my own city, that’s a really important week because it acts both as a window into another life and a mirror back on your own. One might see their religion in a different way when someone from another faith comes to church, temple, or synagogue with them and tries on their religion for a morning.

Mason Pashia: Totally.

David McCullough: You might see your daily job—whether that’s at the Dairy Queen, milking cows, or just bopping around the city—very differently when you have a young person who’s never seen a skyscraper or a cow before.

We launched the program in 2019. We were then the geniuses who started a traveling program on the eve of the pandemic. For about two years…

Mason Pashia: Timing.

David McCullough: Fantastic. Really couldn’t have nailed it better. We spent those two years sketching out on whiteboards how it would work and recruiting schools. In 2021, we sent 20 students on four exchanges between four towns across the country. Since 2021, we’ve put over 1,500 students on over 200 exchanges to more than 100 towns across the country in almost 40 states. We just wrapped up a summer where we sent about 550 students on 67 exchanges across the country.

We’re moving into another year, and I reckon we’ll have between 65 and 80 high schools running anywhere from one to four exchanges apiece next summer. The impact over the last five summers has been extraordinary—more than I even imagined years ago. I could not have predicted how much this would mean to the people taking part in it.

Mason Pashia: Is it—so is this program, it sounds like you’re working with high schools to provide this opportunity. Is it a free program for students? How do they manage numbers if this high school offers it? Do they say, “We have five spots”?

Shorts Content

Program Structure and Activities

David McCullough: The program is totally free, and there’s no merit-based admission criteria of any kind. I believe that this kind of experience ought to be a public good, so I’m running this organization as close to a public good as a private organization can possibly run. We operate through almost always high schools and sometimes community-based nonprofits.

We hire a teacher or employee of that organization who becomes the school’s or organization’s exchange manager. The whole program relies entirely on that person. They recruit students, recruit host families, plan itineraries—all of that with the help of our national team. They are one part camp counselor, one part Peter Pan, running that fun week for the groups of students that arrive.

We’re not a one-to-one exchange program, so it’s not like we swap out Sudbury, Massachusetts, and send them all to Dodge City, Kansas, and then send everyone from Dodge up to Sudbury. We’re actually a network of towns and schools that send their kids to each other in the summer. No students go to the same town together. If you’re contemplating doing experiences like this in your schools, that is critical. It’s critical that they travel alone. It’s critical that they get there with a group of students who are also from all over the country. It’s also critical that there are no barriers to entry because no one’s special for being here. I mean, terrific—you got on the plane and managed to sign up.

Mason Pashia: Right. Yeah, that’s definitely true of my travel experiences. The times where I’ve gone with my wife, who’s my favorite travel companion, I end up meeting way fewer people. The times where I go by myself, I’ve made tons of new friends in the process. I think that’s really, really smart that you only send one person from a school to at least that city.

One question I have—so these itineraries are developed by these volunteer roles or these kind of exchange manager positions. Do the students from that town get to play a role in designing the itinerary? Like, “This is how I see my city, and I want other kids to see it this way.”

David McCullough: They do, and that’s a really important process. Let me make one quick correction too—the exchange managers are actually paid. It’s about commensurate to what a varsity coach would get paid. It’s a lot of work, and we do rely on loads of local volunteers to help that educator run the program.

The itineraries are a methodical process to start. We define that every itinerary item needs to fit into one of four broadly defined buckets: cultural immersion, community events and activities, volunteer or service, and professional development.

Cultural immersion can be trying the barbecue, going to the museum, learning the local dance, or even understanding the dialects—whatever it is that immerses students in the local culture. Community events and activities include things like rodeos, farmers’ markets, and cook-offs. These are the best ways to see a town, and every neighborhood town in America has them, especially in the summer.

The third is a critical piece, which is volunteer or service. All of our exchanges have a day of volunteering, and we tailor that to working on a particularly difficult local issue—one that maybe our travelers have never experienced firsthand before. It’s usually quite a thing to see kids from California rebuild a home that had been leveled by a hurricane and then ask their friends from Louisiana, “Why do you live here if you get hit by one of these things every year?” Their answer is stirring and enlightening for them.

The last category is what we call professional development, which is really another way of saying connecting with interesting local professionals throughout the week. That takes many different forms.

Within those buckets, our exchange managers and students come up with an itinerary that is meant to be both a red-carpet trip to the town—where we’ll do the coolest, most fun, and best activities—and an unvarnished and honest look at what it’s like to grow up there.

The best example I could give is in my own hometown of Sudbury, Massachusetts. There’s the Wayside Inn, which is famous from the old Longfellow poem. It’s a colonial, iconic Massachusetts institution. It’s beautiful, quaint, and has a little restaurant with beautiful walking grounds. Tourists during leaf change season every fall are going to the Wayside Inn. If you come to my town, you can’t miss seeing the Wayside Inn. I think maybe in the 20 years I spent growing up there, we went maybe twice.

Sudbury Pizza, the greasy pizza joint across the street from the supermarket in the middle of town—we were there every week. If you want to know what it means to grow up in Sudbury, you’ve got to go get a slice of Sudbury Pizza. At the American Exchange Project, we do both kinds of activities: the Sudbury Pizza stuff and the Wayside Inn stuff.

Mason Pashia: That’s very cool. We’re accidentally recreating your exchange pipeline. You’re from Sudbury, Massachusetts, and I’m from Kansas. So, we’ve done the Dodge City-Sudbury connection virtually.

David McCullough: Kansas?

Mason Pashia: I’m from Kansas City, but I had some friends or family in Dodge City that I visited a handful of times. I love that modeling of these intentional immersion experiences. I think that checks so many boxes for what we at Getting Smart think of as powerful learning. You have service and values-based experiences, real-world learning, and professions-based exposure. You have this cultural component.

I’d love to know, on a more personal note, how has this shaped how you travel? We don’t talk about travel and exchange in the same way—they are fundamentally different. Yet, from my own place of curiosity, the last few times I’ve traveled, I’ve felt like I’m more of an extractive presence than a contributive one to the communities. I tried volunteering in one place when I was traveling, and it was really rewarding. Then I’ve gone to some other places and either haven’t made that connection or haven’t been able to do it.

I’m curious how you live this out or even how you would advise people to start living some of these tenets in their own travel. This shouldn’t stop when you’re a college freshman—this should technically be our way. You leave home all the time and come back home with more. But it’s so rare that a vacation or a trip feels like that. It feels like it’s just charging and recharging and sometimes depleting a battery further if it’s a lot of logistics.

David McCullough: Bring me my cheeseburger and my drink with my little umbrella, please.

Mason Pashia: Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, I don’t know—messy question, but I’m curious if that framing has had any staying power for your own travel.

David McCullough: What scared me more than anything was that none of the contacts I’d written to in any of the locations I was planning to go to had written me back.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

David McCullough: So there I was, planning this whole summer with some money from my school, and no one was getting back to me. I think it was my dad who just said, “Just go. Just go. What else do you have to do?” And I thought, “You’re right. Pardon my French, but screw it. Let’s go.” So I did. I sent an email saying, “I’m coming.”

The day before I got to my first town—the day before I got to Catula, Texas—you’ll never guess who wrote me and said, “We can’t wait to see you. We’ll meet you for dinner tomorrow night.” I think we are in this kind of paralysis through over-analysis, where we talk, think, rationalize, and analyze these emotional spectrums and different approaches to happiness. I often think: just go.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, totally. I think that’s a great message for people at any age—to just go. All right, give me just a couple of words on where you all are headed next. What are some goals? What does scale look like for you? Then we can land this.

Future Growth and Vision

David McCullough: Right now, we’re at the beginning of a very large growth campaign. I’m hoping that one year from now, there will be 400 high schools in all 50 states—and possibly even a territory or two—running the American Exchange Project at their schools. Right now, we have an open call out looking for educators, principals, and administrators across the country who want their students to have an experience like this.

The story for us over the next year is going to be one of growth and scaling. We’ve been very lucky to work with some extraordinary funders and philanthropies across the country. They’ve been enormously generous and allowed us to grow our program to a great degree, and I think that’s going to continue.

We’re also starting to advance legislation and public funding in a number of states to make domestic exchanges part of education departments at the state level. Additionally, we’re building the tools, technologies, and infrastructure we need so that when we get to 400 high schools—and the thousands and thousands of students that will come from those 400 high schools—we’ll be using the same models and tools that we’ll need when, one day, hundreds of thousands and maybe even a million kids a year are doing this.

This growth campaign is, in one effort, to get us all over the country and, in another effort, to develop the skills, tools, and infrastructure we need to make this as scalable as possible. Our pitch, our dream, is kind of what I said at the beginning of the call: let’s take a note from the Erasmus program in Europe and bring domestic exchange here.

I think our country is really getting in its own way by not offering students any kind of uniform, civic coming-of-age ritual. Young people are coming of age in their own silos. They are primed for the sorts of division and the perception gap, to put it lightly, that we see across the country today. I see in this experience—a week in a different town and a week hanging out with kids in your own hometown—an opportunity for the kind of ritual this country might need right now.

Mason Pashia: Hmm. Beautiful. Well, David, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for sharing about this awesome program. We’ll have links in the show notes for everybody to find everything they could possibly need to learn more and reach out to contact you all. It’s been great. Thanks for staying curious and helping me do the same today.

David McCullough: Thanks, Mason. It’s been a pleasure.

Guest Bio

David McCullough III

David McCullough III is the co-founder and CEO of the American Exchange Project (AEP). AEP is a non-profit organization that sends high school students on week-long trips to different parts of the United States to foster understanding and reduce polarization. The idea for the program stemmed from a cross-country trip McCullough took, where he realized the diversity and acceptance among Americans. He believes that bridging divides is crucial for American democracy. 

He has a BA in American Studies from Yale and an MPhil in Economic and Social History from the University of Cambridge.

Links

• Watch the full video here
• American Exchange Project
• LinkedIn