When he decided to spend a semester in Budapest last year, Manveer Sahota, 22, didn't know much about the country of Hungary, other than it was part of the old Austrian Empire.

"I wanted to enrich my knowledge of that area and kind of go into the unknown," said Sahota, who is one of about 200 students at California State University, Sacramento, who studied abroad last year.

A business major and sociology minor, Sahota became fascinated with how people in the Eastern European country were adjusting after decades of communist rule -- "basically lifting themselves up by their bootstraps to catch up to the rest of the world."

While few students take advantage of foreign exchange programs in high school, studying abroad in college is considered by many as a rite of passage. About 1,200 students at the University of California, Davis, spent a summer to a year studying in one of 40 countries.

Even community college students have the opportunity. The Los Rios Community College District, with four campuses in the Sacramento area, offers semester-long and summer trips to a rotating list of overseas cities, including Beijing; Dublin, Ireland; Florence, Italy; London; Madrid, Spain; and Paris. About 25 to 40 students go each semester.

Sahota, who lived in an apartment with students from France and Italy, said it was a life-changing experience.

"It also makes people more marketable," he said, adding he already scored an internship with the U.S. Department of Commerce and hopes to work overseas one day.

In fact, encouraging students to live in a foreign country to learn about another culture has become a national priority since the Sept. 11 attacks -- so much so that Congress declared 2006 the "Year of Study Abroad."

Last November, federal lawmakers passed a resolution "to address a serious deficit in global competence in the United States," with a goal of sending an additional 1 million American students to study in a foreign country in the next 10 years.

The resolution cited a National Geographic survey, which found that 87 percent of students in the United States between the ages of 18 and 24 cannot locate Iraq on a world map, 83 percent cannot find Afghanistan, 58 percent cannot find Japan and 11 percent cannot find the United States.

About 190,000 college students -- roughly 1 percent of all undergraduates -- studied abroad in the 2004-05 school year, according to the nonprofit Institute of International Education.

A larger percentage wants to go, but students are scared away by the potential cost, much more than concerns about speaking the language or transferring academic credits, according to a recent poll by IIEPassport.org and StudyAbroad.com, online study-abroad resources.

Costs vary depending on locations and programs. In addition to regular tuition, students have to factor in plane tickets, the higher cost of living in cities such as London and Paris, and other expenses.

However, as Sahota found, "it was actually a lot cheaper" living in Budapest than Sacramento.

Many students also are surprised to learn that their financial aid is transferable to study-abroad programs, said Kimberly Gradel, study abroad adviser for IIEPassport.org.

Scholarships may also be available.